Edison’s Alley (27 page)

Mitch was not present in the image, which meant that if he didn’t leave of his own accord, Petula would have to find a way to
make
him leave to fulfill the future that she knew
would happen. Or that she knows will have happened. Or that she had known was going to be happening.

Grrrrr!
She hated seeing through that lens. The tenses alone were enough to make her want to kick out someone’s spleen.

But when she exited the truck at Nick’s house, she was delighted to see that, somewhere along the route, Mitch had apparently fallen out, solving the problem for her. It was nice that the
universe had, for once, taken care of the future without making her do all the heavy lifting.

Meanwhile, in a sketchy part of town that was getting sketchier by the minute, Mitch stalked an irascible twister. It appeared to have a life of its own, getting neither
stronger nor weaker. It was its own perpetual motion machine.

At one point, it began to double back and approach Mitch; then it seemed to stall, spinning in place, as if inviting a standoff. Mitch was ready. He raised the bellows.

A bellows, Mitch knew, didn’t just expel air. It took in air as well, albeit much more slowly—and he guessed that if he pulled the handles of the bellows apart with the same force he
had used to push them together, maybe, just maybe, he could reverse the process.

He stood in the middle of the road, amid panicking drivers and pedestrians who were barely able to comprehend the rain of cats and were probably expecting dogs to follow.

As he looked at the swirling wind, he was struck by a thought. In a sense he was looking at himself—not that he was filled with angry flying cats—but he knew what it was like to have
all of his thoughts and feelings spinning out of control.

And that’s when he realized this tornado wasn’t just a random churning of wind. The bellows—like so many of Tesla’s devices—tapped into something inside of the
user. The bellows had reached into his soul and pulled out the cyclone that churned within him. Perhaps, he thought, if he could wrangle the one, he could wrangle the other.

As the tornado neared him, he took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. He put aside thoughts of the Accelerati and his father. He put aside thoughts of all the times he had fouled things up.
Then he began pulling the handles of the bellows apart, filling the bladder with the tempestuous wind.

Once. Twice. Three times.

Like before, the third time was the charm. The tornado collapsed into a lazy eddy, and Mitch found himself buried beneath a veritable dog pile of cats.

As the wind stopped, the roiling turmoil inside him became still. The cats, dizzy and more than ready for a warm windowsill, staggered away. With all the other noise cleared from his mind, Mitch
could hear the ring of truth. And it explained everything.

There are things you don’t understand,
his father had said of the Accelerati. Well, not anymore.

Nick, Vince, and Caitlin struggled to get the harp up the walk to Nick’s front door, while Petula seemed more than happy to supervise without actually lifting a finger.
To Nick the harp felt increasingly heavy as they maneuvered it. It was probably just because his arms were tired after having carried it out from the Accelerati headquarters—but at this point
he wouldn’t put it past Tesla to imbue the thing with some sort of variable density that changed inversely to the exhaustion of the people schlepping it. It wobbled in their arms as they
moved it toward the front door and began to tip. Caitlin reached up to balance it.

“Careful!” yelled Petula.

But Caitlin’s hand accidentally brushed the strings, and Nick felt the vibration deep within himself. The feeling was both pleasant and unpleasant at once. Like a sudden chill up his
spine, but warm. As it reverberated he could feel more than see a deeper perspective, a larger picture.

What happened today would be important. And it could go either way. There was no predetermination to Tesla’s plan—just a series of probable outcomes. And today’s probability
was simple. It was no more complex than the flipping of a coin. Fifty-fifty. Reality, as they knew it, was going to change. Things could turn out very well, or horribly wrong. To see it in such
simple terms was sobering—and heartening, because it meant he hadn’t lost. Not yet!

“Never lose hope until the last pitch is thrown,” his father often said, for with him, it was always about baseball.

His father!

Vince had told Nick that he was out in the backyard—and in that moment of clarity, Nick knew he needed to protect him, once more, from a reality he was not prepared to accept.

“Caitlin,” Nick said, “can you go out back and check on my dad? Make sure he doesn’t come into the house right now…and just make sure that he’s
okay.”

He thought she might ask him what he meant, but she didn’t. Instead she unclipped the flour sifter/force-field generator and handed it to him. “For lost causes,” she said.

In spite of their dire circumstances, Nick found himself smiling. “Thanks, Caitlin. For everything.”

Then he did something that not even he was expecting. He kissed her. It was just a quick peck on the cheek, but it carried with it a spark that was more than just static buildup.

“Ouch,” she said reflexively, then she touched her cheek, laughing.

“Sorry,” Nick said, although he wasn’t sorry at all.

Caitlin strode off quickly, not wanting Nick or the others to see her blush. Mercifully, Petula had been looking the other way, almost as if she had known the kiss was coming,
but Vince stared with a creepy, detached amusement that had nothing to do with being undead.

She found Mr. Slate in the backyard, digging—but he wasn’t exactly gardening. He was in the process of unearthing a huge steel slab.

At least it looked like steel. Stainless, perhaps, because although it had been buried in the ground, it showed no signs of rust. Mr. Slate had exposed about eight feet of it—enough for
Caitlin to see that it was more than a slab, it was the top edge of a band of metal, over a foot wide and slightly curved. The thing was so big that he hadn’t found the bottom yet.

“Hi, Caitlin,” said Mr. Slate, not looking up from his work. “I keep thinking just one more foot and I’ll get to the end of it, but it keeps on going.”

Following the curve with her eyes, Caitlin suspected that the band formed a perfect circle around the house.

“Now it’s a mission,” Mr. Slate said cheerfully.

Caitlin looked at him curiously. There was something about him that troubled her—and when he finally glanced at her, she saw something in his eyes that troubled her even more. She’d
seen that vague gaze before. Meanwhile, up above, lightning arced between two clouds, oscillating like a jump rope.

“Mr. Slate,” she said, “you shouldn’t be digging around something metallic. I mean, look at the sky.”

“Yes.” He looked up, noted the massive sparks that volleyed between the clouds, then adjusted his baseball cap. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“But…” Caitlin couldn’t understand how the man could be so blasé, as if there was nothing unusual at all…

She gasped when she realized the reason, and she turned back toward the house. “Nick!” she yelled, running. “Nick! Don’t go in the attic!”

But Nick was already there, pulling the harp through the trapdoor.

Vince pushed from below as he climbed the spring-loaded attic ladder, lifting his end of the harp through the opening. “So where does it go?”

Nick knew with a single glance. “Move the weight machine to the side.”

Vince took a deep breath. “Okay.” He rolled up his sleeves, put his hands on the weight machine, and pushed with all his strength. The machine didn’t budge.

“Oh, right,” said Nick. He reached over and turned the weight machine on. “Now try.”

Vince easily slid the machine out of the way then, and Nick put the harp into place. It actually clicked into position, fitting perfectly up against the tall stage lamp.

Nick dragged the weight machine back so that its handles gently grazed the invisible strings of the harp. He could feel the resonance within him as those strings began to vibrate. But the
vibration felt off somehow. He could sense a gaping absence at the center of the machine, the void left by the items still missing. He could reconnect the fan, bellows, and other items they had
used in their assault on the Accelerati, but that wouldn’t change the fact that the core of the machine was mostly hollow. The completion of Tesla’s great design was so close, and yet
was only as close as the farthest object. Wherever that was.

It was painful to be this near to completion. So painful that his head hurt. But it hurt a whole lot more when he was hit from behind and knocked out.

The clarinet was a heavy thing. Much heavier than an actual instrument. Perhaps that’s because it was made of a cobalt-molybdenum alloy. Not a conductor’s choice
for an orchestra, but superb as a conductor of electricity.

The Accelerati had wanted to weaponize it, but at the moment it was good enough as is. Good enough for clobbering Nick over the head, anyway.

Petula hoped she hadn’t cracked his skull. She had practiced on some melons at home, and found the perfect combination of vector and force that would dent the melon without cracking it.
She had to trust that Nick’s melon offered a similar level of resistance.

“Hey,” said Vince, a bit slow to react, “what are you—”

Petula ripped the sunglasses from his face, disconnecting him from the battery in his backpack. She wondered with an unpleasant shiver whether ending the life of someone who had already died
multiple times could still be considered murder. Well, it wasn’t something she could stop to think about now.

She lifted the backpack from his shoulders as he dropped. She hadn’t expected Vince to fall down the attic ladder, but he did—picking off Caitlin, who had been on her way up.

“A twofer!” said Petula.

“Petula! Help!” Caitlin screamed from below, clearly not yet grasping the full extent of the situation.

“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” Petula said. Then she yanked up the spring-loaded attic stairs, slammed the trapdoor shut, and wedged the broken baseball bat through the
spring so the stairs could not be pulled open from below. Now Caitlin and the re-dead Vince were locked out, and no longer her problem.

When she turned, Jorgenson crawled out from under Nick’s bed, like the proverbial monster.

“Well done,” he said as he stood up, towering over her. “Very well done.”

While Jorgenson examined the machine, Petula checked Nick’s pulse. He was out cold, but still alive. His head wasn’t even bleeding. Score.

Jorgenson regarded the invention with awe. “It was right under our noses all along. I was up here, but I didn’t see it for what it was.” He looked at Petula with very nearly
the same regard. “I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”

Twenty-four hours and five minutes earlier, when Petula had looked through the time-bending periscope and had seen them dragging the harp toward Nick’s front door, she
knew there were only two possible scenarios:

Either she would betray the Accelerati, as it had appeared she was doing…

…or she could play the situation to her personal advantage.

Then the periscope had revealed Nick giving Caitlin that awful little kiss, and she knew there was really only one choice.

“What do you see?” Jorgenson had asked her.

“See for yourself.” She stepped back and allowed Jorgenson to watch the scene through the periscope. After a quiet moment, he glanced over at her coldly, ready, she assumed, to call
security and have her removed. But before he could say a word, she took the wind out of his sails.

“Don’t bother locking me up,” she had told him. “If you’re seeing it, then it’s going to happen, no matter what you do.” Then she added, “But we
can make sure that it happens on
our
terms.”

And so—without even letting the other Accelerati know what he was up to—Jorgenson left the harp unattended in a shipping crate, with only a skeleton crew at headquarters to defend
it. Then he went to Nick’s house, subdued Mr. Slate with a new and improved mind-numbing fob, and waited for the boy to return—which, of course, Jorgenson knew would happen, because he
had already seen it.

Had he kept watching through the periscope, however, he also would have seen what came next—and things might have been very different…

“Do you know where the items go?” Jorgenson asked as he studied the machine in Nick’s attic.

“I think…” Petula began. She put the clarinet where she had seen Nick place it before. Then she took the jack-in-the-box, sifter, and fan from Nick’s belt and added them
as well. Once she was done, Jorgenson reached into his pocket and pulled out the time-bending lens. He secured it to the frame of the box camera—which was now aimed right into the bell of the
clarinet.

Up above, through the pyramid of glass at the apex of the attic, Petula could see the spidery-sparking asteroid thousands of miles above their heads.

“The battery!” Jorgenson said. “Its leads must connect to these posts on the washboard!” With each passing moment he began to sound less like the reserved professor and
more like the mad scientist. His gray hair, teased by static, made the image complete. “It’s a primer engine!” he announced. “Don’t you see? It’s like the
ignition of a car. And I can hot-wire it! I can turn it on!”

“But it’s not finished!’ Petula reminded him.

Jorgenson dismissed the thought with a wave of his good hand as he examined the machine, his eyes rapidly darting from piece to piece, his mind trying to take it all in. “It’s
incomplete, but I believe there are enough components here for us to be able to see what it does.”

Petula hesitated. She looked to the harp, remembering the feeling it had given her when she first plucked it. “But…but
I
must complete the circuit,” she told him.

He turned his gaze to her with predatory smoothness. An owl eyeing a mouse. “I’ve been waiting my entire life for this moment,” he said. “Don’t even think of taking
it away from me.”