Edison’s Alley (17 page)

W
ith the pieces back in place, Nick finally allowed himself to relax a little. But when he ventured close enough to touch the incomplete machine,
he could still feel the presence of all of the other wayward objects out there.

Not enough to know
where
they were, only
that
they were.

This is how he knew that the harp was still intact and hadn’t been consumed in some sort of localized disaster in the harpist’s home. He could sense it resonating with all of the
objects in the machine, as well as the ones still to be recovered.

He looked up at the window in his ceiling, the glass pinnacle of the attic pyramid, and wondered whether it was there to bring light in, or to channel energy out. Perhaps both.

Of course, all of this was just intuition. The farther Nick got from his attic, the less he trusted these feelings. He often wondered if he was just deluding himself—until he stood in the
presence of Tesla’s great creation again, and found that absolute, undeniable sense of interconnectedness. It was so comforting, so overwhelming that, were he a weaker kid, he might never
leave his attic.

But he wasn’t weak. And now that he had faced the Accelerati head-on and fought them off, he felt more confident than ever.

“Confidence can be dangerous,” Caitlin had told him. “You might have scared them away, but they’ll be back—and when they come back, they’ll hit
hard.”

“Then we’ll hit back harder,” Nick had responded. But he knew they needed a plan.

And so, on Monday evening, Nick gathered his friends under the guise of a school project. Caitlin, Vince, Mitch, and Petula climbed the steep steps into the attic for a meeting of the minds.

Nick’s dad allowed them their space, and if he had any suspicions about their activities, he kept them to himself. Just to be on the safe side, though, Vince wore a hoodie so Mr. Slate
couldn’t really see his face—and if he did, and trapped Vince in a conversation, Nick told Vince to pretend he was his own twin brother.

“The gravity’s getting stronger,” Nick said to the others in his attic. To prove it, he took off his shoes and set them on the floor next to him. “My bed and desk are
nailed down, but everything else migrates to the center.”

The shoes did not appear to move.

“Fail,” said Vince.

“It’s like the hour hand of a clock,” Nick told him. “Look again in five minutes.” Then he noticed that Vince’s body odor was ranker than usual.

Petula, of course, was the one who had to comment. “Ew, did something die in here?”

“That would be me,” said Vince. “Thanks to you.”

Vince didn’t seem bitter, just resigned, which was the way he had lived his pre-undead life. Today he wore a shirt proclaiming
YOLO
on the front, with the second
o
crossed out and replaced with a hand-scrawled
t.
Nick noticed he was looking a little green under the neckline. Vince noticed him noticing.

“I think I’m growing moss,” Vince casually announced. “I really should do a science project on myself.”

“If the Accelerati nab you,” Caitlin said, “I’m sure they’ll do it
for
you.”

“Which is why,” Nick said, getting back to business, “we have to make sure they don’t. We can’t just wait until they take the next swing. We need a
strategy.”

“Why don’t we hide everything?” suggested Mitch. “It doesn’t all have to be here in your attic—we can put the stuff in different places.”

Nick threw Caitlin a look that she threw back at him.

“We can’t,” Nick told them.

“Why not?” challenged Petula. “Seems like the logical thing to do.”

Nick had considered that idea himself, but every time he thought about taking the machine apart, he felt like something was being torn from his insides. That feeling had to mean something, It
couldn’t be ignored.

“Because we just can’t,” Nick said, a little more forcefully.

He stood up, walked over to the machine, and touched it. The static shock it gave him was a taste of something far greater. Something he couldn’t yet explain.

“Nick,” said Mitch, “you’re acting really weird. I mean, weirder than usual.”

Nick turned to him. If they were to be a part of this, they needed to know everything. He pointed at the objects. “Take a closer look,” he said. “I mean, really
look.”

Mitch was the first to catch on. “It’s a single machine,” he said.

Nick nodded. “Exactly.”

Petula let out a soft whistle. Vince drew his knees up to his chest.

“Caitlin and I figured it out just before the asteroid was bonked into orbit.”

“You could have told us,” said Vince.

“It was the end of the world,” Nick reminded him. “And you had just died. At the time, it didn’t seem all that important.”

“So what does it do?”

“Tesla dreamed of bringing free wireless energy to the world. This is how he was going to do it,” Nick explained. “This machine needs to be here. It needs to be completed. And
we’re the ones who have to complete it.”

There was a moment of silence so loud it seemed to echo.

Then Mitch said, “Nick, your shoes.”

They all looked; in the five minutes they had been talking, Nick’s shoes had migrated about two feet closer to the machine. Now they all could see the gravity of the situation.

“How can you be sure we’re the ones who have to complete it?” asked Vince. “I mean, it’s just a feeling, right?”

Nick nodded. “That’s true, but it’s a pretty strong one.”

“I don’t know about any of you,” said Vince, “but I’m not much of a believer in feelings. My mother is all about feelings. They lead to nothing but motivational
greeting cards and designated ‘happy places’ all over our house. I’d rather have cold hard facts in my cold dead hands.”

Caitlin turned to Nick. “What do you think we should do?”

“All the garage-sale stuff stays here,” said Nick, in spite of Vince’s reservations. “And we continue to build the machine. The Accelerati might have the harp, but they
haven’t gotten their hands on anything else yet, as far as we know.”

“How are we supposed to protect all this stuff from them if we keep it here?” asked Mitch. “And, for that matter, how do we protect ourselves?”

“I don’t know!” Nick said, exasperated. “That why I brought you all here—I thought maybe together we could figure it out.” He looked toward the machine again.
“If this thing could just tell us what to do…”

His voice trailed off. The machine couldn’t talk, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t communicating with him on some deeper level, where words couldn’t reach. “You
know,” he said slowly, “I think the answer is right in front of us.”

They all followed his gaze. Caitlin was the first to understand. “You want to use Tesla’s devices as weapons against the Accelerati?”

“I don’t
want
to…but I think we
have
to.”

“Then we’re no better than them!” Caitlin said.

“Yes we are,” Mitch said, “because we’re gonna weaponize them for the sake of good!”

“There’s a difference between using the inventions as weapons,” Nick explained, “and using them to defend ourselves.”

“Is there?” Caitlin asked. “That sounds like the argument for every war in history.”

“They already killed Vince,” Nick told her. “And Jorgenson tried to kill me the other day. Sorry to tell you this, Caitlin, but we’re already at war.”

Caitlin stood up, crossing her arms. “I have no intention of killing anyone. Do you?”

Nick turned his gaze away. “I think I already have.”

Caitlin gasped and the others looked equally shocked. Nick’s shoulders sagged with the weight of his confession. He hadn’t told his friends about this part of his encounter with the
Accelerati. “I froze one of them with the fan. I—I might have killed her.”

“No, you didn’t,” Petula blurted, and when everyone turned to look at her, she giggled nervously and said, “I mean, they’re the Accelerati, right? I’m sure
they figured out a way to defrost her.”

And since that was what Nick wanted to believe, he didn’t question it. “Thanks,” he said. “I hope you’re right.”

“So you have a plan?” Vince asked. “Or are you going to keep that from us, too?”

“We’ll each take one object to protect us,” Nick said. “The rest stay here, in the attic. And if Jorgenson comes after us with his braniac flunkies and his fake smile and
his stupid vanilla suit, we’ll smack him down so hard he’ll have to crawl away.”

Mitch looked up suddenly. “Vanilla suit? What about a vanilla suit?”

“It’s what he wears,” Caitlin told him. “The Accelerati all wear these weird pastel suits.”

“They’re made of Madagascan spider silk,” Nick added.

“…and in a certain light,” mumbled Mitch, “they seem to shimmer…”

Then Mitch Murló took a deep dive into himself.

Humans have the uncanny ability to distance themselves from anything real. Sometimes, for their own protection, they create stories that pass for history because creating
meaning is so much easier than searching for it. The stories become symbols on a page, and in the end the page is replaced by electronic strings of ones and zeros floating in a cloud that is not
really a cloud at all. The truth is filtered through so many levels of unreality that we can’t remember what transpired over the course of time, or even what we had for breakfast this
morning.

Our relationship with money is much the same, and few people knew this better than the Murló family. Thousands of years ago, money was something tangible—a string of shells or beads
at first, then precious metals in the form of coins that everyone agreed were worth a certain amount. The coins gave way to worthless paper, but everyone chose to agree that the bills were worth
something, too.

Then paper was replaced with the same endless string of ones and zeros that had swallowed all of human history. The world’s wealth no longer existed in material form. It was a concept in
the cloud that didn’t actually exist…

…which is why a computer programmer with great skill and the right amount of inspiration could figure out a way to steal unreal pennies from theoretical bank accounts and amass three-quarters
of a billion dollars in less than five seconds, by clicking a single button on his laptop.

Now Mr. Murló was in prison, perhaps for the rest of his life, and the Accelerati had a secret bank account of untold millions that existed only because computers agreed that it
existed.

Throughout his father’s first year of incarceration, Mitch had tried to wrap his head around how something as imaginary as digital money could ruin so many lives—while improving the
lives of the monsters who had used his father and then discarded him.

And so, when Mitch finally connected the dots and realized that those monsters were the very same people they were fighting now, his mind whirled in a feedback loop of fury. It was as if he had
left the attic and gone to a faraway place, a place where time and space curved around on itself, allowing Mitch to repeatedly kick his own butt for not realizing it sooner.

While Mitch traveled in his own head, the others made plans in the attic. It was decided that Nick would keep the fan and Jorgenson’s neural disrupter for his defense. Vince would take the
narc-in-the-box that rendered people unconscious, since, by his own admission, it suited his personality. Petula was assigned the torturous clarinet, because the others could easily imagine her
playing an instrument of torture. Mitch would get the dust-devil bellows, because most of the video games they had traded for it were his. And Caitlin—the conscientious objector of the
group—agreed to hold on to the force-field sifter, since it was truly the most defensive of all the objects.

Mitch hadn’t heard any of this. When he returned from his unhappy place, there was only one thought on his mind.

“Where’s the remote?” he said with an uncharacteristic growl.

They all turned to him, a bit thrown by the snarl.

“Huh?” said Nick.

“The remote that freaking Mr. Vanilla Suit tried to kill you with. You said you broke it. Well, I want the pieces. Where are they?”

The others looked at one another, not sure what to make of this.

“I…threw it into the fireplace, Mitch,” Nick said. “I burned it up.”

Mitch stood, his fingers balling into fists so tight he could feel his nails cutting into his palms.
“WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?”

“Because,” said Caitlin, her voice calm, as if she were trying to talk someone off a ledge, “it was too dangerous.”

“It wasn’t dangerous
enough
!” Mitch yelled. “It could only kill one of them at a time. I want to kill them
all
! I want them all dead! Every last one of
them! I want them dead
now
.” Tears burst from his eyes. He couldn’t control them; he didn’t even try.

Nick stood up. “Mitch, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” he screamed. “Who said anything was wrong?”

“Mitch, that thing was made by the Accelerati, and we—”

Then Mitch blurted,
“—can never destroy the Accelerati with their own technology.”
He covered his mouth with his hands. It had come out like a belch. He hadn’t
meant to say it, but then, he never meant to finish the sentences that he did whenever he was angry—the ones that were undeniably true—thanks to the strange power he had absorbed from
the Shut Up ’N Listen. Just like the answers that had flown from his mouth when Nick needed to know how to save the world. Or the things Mitch had shouted in the heat of his fight with Steven
Gray. It was only when his emotions were running high that these unintended phrases came out.

Sometimes they were helpful, sometimes they were just annoying, but they were always true, and right now he did not want the answer to be true.

“Shut up!” he yelled, but not to anyone else in the attic. He was yelling it to himself. And he bounded down the attic ladder, with no clue as to where he wanted to go, except
out.

Nick followed him, not only because he cared about his friend, but also because he saw an opportunity. What they needed more than anything else right now were answers, even if
they weren’t the answers Mitch wanted to hear.