Run (The Tesla Effect #2) (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

“Joley,
please
try to keep your blade up. The tip should be at your opponent’s eye level, the grip flat against your wrist—have you listened to nothing I’ve said for the last month?” Gregor didn’t even try to hide his frustration.

Joley shrugged and smiled sheepishly, but he wasn’t especially perturbed by the fencing master’s criticism.

“Tesla,” said Gregor imperiously, his fitted white uniform, lightly oiled black-and-white hair and clipped moustache suggestive of an earlier century. Bizzy had a crush on him, thought he looked like a grown-up version of Alex Meraz, the actor who’d played one of the hot werewolves in those
Twilight
movies. But Tesla couldn’t see it. The fencing instructor just seemed like an old dude—nice enough, but definitely not in the category of guys-with-potential.

Gregor motioned Tesla over with a quick flick of the blade in his hand. “Please. Let us show him how it is done. Again.”

“Really?” Tesla mumbled as she walked toward the two. “Why is this day one endless embarrassment?”

“Wait, there was embarrassment?” Bizzy asked as she pulled her mask off and turned toward Tesla, despite the fact that Finn was in mid-lunge and, a split second later, the tip of his blade touched Bizzy’s shoulder.

“Damn it, Biz, we’re in the middle of a bout!” Finn pulled his own mask up and back so that it sat on top of his gold-brown curls, damp and dark with perspiration.

Bizzy ignored him. She was sixteen, almost a year younger than Tesla, but had graduated from high school early. In fact, she was already a college senior—an acknowledged genius, it was clear she had missed out on a normal school life. Endlessly fascinated by everything Tesla did, Bizzy’s darkly lined eyes shone and all the metal in her pierced face gleamed.

Gregor ignored them, his own mask now in place, and faced Tesla. “
En garde
,” he said softly.

Tesla’s right hand held the grip of her foil and the pommel rested easily on the inside of her wrist. The slight curve of her blade was apparent only as she peered down its length to the tip, held lightly and steadily at Gregor’s eye level.

“Now, please observe,” he said, his voice slightly muffled by the wire-mesh mask over his face.

Gregor feinted forward, a half advance, so that only his right foot and blade darted toward Tesla.

Tesla parried, a turn of her wrist and a movement six inches to the left that effectively moved Gregor’s blade aside so that it missed her body entirely as he drove it forward. He recovered smoothly, and his bent knees made him seem too short for his broad shoulders, though the power in his forty-year-old fencer’s body was unmistakable. He retreated, and Tesla advanced toward him with two quick thrusts that he parried easily. Their swords crossed as their feet kept a uniform distance between them. They advanced and retreated, first one and then the other, a lovely and deadly dance accompanied by the staccato
click-click-click
of steel on steel.

Suddenly, Tesla moved the tip of her blade in a barely-there circle around Gregor’s, a circle with a diameter of exactly three quarters of an inch, and at the very moment she was outside his blade she lunged with her right foot, a crisp explosion in which she thrust her blade at Gregor, her left hand thrown down and back for balance, her stance wide and low.

It had happened so quickly, Tesla only realized she’d gotten inside Gregor’s defenses and scored a touch when he froze, her blade arced dramatically, its tip buried in the heavy white cloth of his fencing jacket, right over his heart.

“
Touché
.” The master stepped back and pulled off his mask, his long, graying ponytail tied back neatly behind his neck. “Astonishing,” he added softly, staring at her as he shook his head.

“Geez, Tesla, could you try not to be this much better than the rest of us?” said Bizzy, her admiration and resentment both apparent. Then she smiled, and the stud just below her bottom lip twinkled as it moved in the light. “Except for you, of course, Gregor.”

“It was a lucky shot,” Tesla protested. “Besides, Beckett and Finn are way better than I am. Beckett won’t even lower herself to train with us.”

“Beckett is better with weapons than everyone on the planet,” Bizzy conceded. “But I’m not sure Finn’s better than you anymore, even though he’s been fencing forever.” The Goth girl absently pulled at her short hair as she tried to reshape its black spikes where her mask had flattened them down.

“Four years, Biz,” said Finn. “Not so long, really. But I have a few moves I don’t think Tesla’s seen.” He turned to look at Tesla as she pulled the mask off her head and her hair spilled out around her shoulders, and he grinned. “You do make it look easy, though, I’ll give you that.”

Tesla felt wary—Finn hadn’t flirted with her in months, and that had sounded suspiciously flirtatious. She’d thought he was done with her. Last summer they’d kissed, more than once, had actually seemed pretty hot for each other, and she’d thought they were—well, heading toward something, though they’d never said exactly what. But after her kidnapped father had been rescued from Sebastian Nilsen, Finn had become totally hands-off. Friendly, but that was it. There had been no explanation, no discussion at all. It had hurt her at first, but she was over it, she reminded herself as she considered him silently, her strange, mismatched eyes narrowed.

“She is a natural,” Gregor agreed.

“Well, this unnatural athlete—or, wait, maybe I’m naturally unathletic—yes, that’s brilliant—either way, I’m done for the day,” said Joley, pulling open the velcro ripstop at the neck of his jacket. His narrow black eyes, always seemingly alight with laughter, added to his fencing whites leant him a decidedly dashing air.

Gregor put his mask under his left arm, raised his blade and held it vertically in front of his face. Everyone else followed suit as they hurriedly lined up to face him. As one, they whipped their blades down and swept the tips just above the floor in salute. Five thin blades of steel rushed forcefully through the air with a
swish
that signaled the end of the lesson.

Gregor moved to the staircase, but called back to them as he left the basement training room that he would see them in three days for their next session. Bizzy had already shimmied out of her jacket, her purple, black, and greenish-yellow ribbed tank underneath like a giant, mottled bruise that hugged her thin body.

“So what happened today?” she asked Tesla, her curious, open expression defying the dark eyeliner and spikey hair, the piercings that all seemed to suggest cool detachment.

Tesla shrugged and wished she’d never mentioned it. “Not much. Assembly. A bunch of us got some stupid awards.”

“That hardly sounds like embarrassment,” Joley said, his clipped London accent lending additional formality to what the others called his cross-examination voice. “You did say ‘embarrassment’ earlier. What did you mean?”

Tesla looked to Finn for help, but he was at his locker storing his equipment.
Oh for God’s sake, just tell them
, she thought.
They’ll laugh, who cares. Get it over with
.

“It was minor, you guys. The whole school was in the auditorium, I was on the stage with a couple of other people. Some jackass threw one of those really hard, solid rubber balls at my head from the audience and—well, I caught it and threw it back. That’s it.”

Finn ambled over and stood next to Bizzy. All three of them looked at Tesla.

“So you’re on stage,” Finn said. “And the whole school is in the audience.”

“Yeah?” Tesla said, wary.

“And some little ball hurtles out of nowhere at your head,” Bizzy said.

Tesla merely looked at her and waited.

“Did you hit anybody?” Joley asked.

“Um, yeah. The guy who threw it,” Tesla mumbled.

“How far away was he?” Finn pressed.

“I don’t know,” Tesla began, but when she saw the look on his face she threw her hands up. “Fine. He was sixty two feet away from me, and he’d thrown the ball overhand, so I adjusted two feet for the arc of his trajectory, calculated that to the speed I knew I’d throw, in order to hit him right in his stupid face. Satisfied?”

“Yes,” Bizzy crowed. “You’re totally an Avenger—I wish I’d seen it! Are you sure you hit him? Absolutely certain?”

Tesla had to laugh. “Yes, Biz, I definitely hit him, right between the eyes, I’m told, and he has a big goose egg on his forehead.” She turned to Finn. “Keisha texted me the confirmation. Of course.”

“Of course,” he said, and they exchanged grins over the predictability of his cousin Keisha, who was Tesla’s best friend.

“That. Is. So. Awesome,” Bizzy said, her joy over the unnamed boy with the lump on his head somewhat unseemly.

“You’re a bloodthirsty little bugger, aren’t you?” Joley said as he and Bizzy walked toward the stairs—well, Joley walked. Bizzy skipped.

“Impressive, Tes, even for you,” Finn said as he walked slowly toward her.

“Yeah, well. It was actually kind of awful.” She took a step back, as if they still held blades in their hands. “Everybody laughed. That jerk with the ball called me a math geek.” She was clearly offended.

Finn laughed, took another step toward her, and she scowled at him to mask the effect the sound of his laugh and sight of his gorgeous mouth always had on her.

“What?” he said, hands up, palms facing the ceiling in mock surrender. “You have to admit, it’s kind of funny.”

Finn watched her with more interest than he had in a long time, and it made Tesla edgy as she took another step back, maintaining the space between them.

“Has it occurred to you,” he said, his head tilted just slightly to the side as he considered her, “that those spatial-relationship skills of yours have gotten better—a whole lot better, and all of a sudden?”

“No,” she said quickly, then changed her strategy. “I don’t know what you mean.” She deliberately avoided his eyes.

“Yes you do,” he said quietly as he continued to advance. “You know my London trainer medaled in 2004 in Beijing, so I know good when I see it. You took up fencing a couple months ago, and you got the touch on Gregor with a disengage that looked Olympic-quality to me.”

“No I didn’t.” Tesla’s back was against the wall of lockers now, and she had nowhere else to go. Finn placed one hand against the wall beside her head and leaned in.

“Yes, you did,” he said again, his eyes on her mouth.

“Look, I really should go,” she said, her voice maddeningly shaky.

“What’s the rush, Danger Girl? Aren’t you going to parry?” His voice was pitched low in invitation.

“Maybe,” she evaded, surprised to hear his nickname for her again. He hadn’t used it since—well, in a while. “I’ve got to consider my options.”

“Hmm. Too late. I think this touch is mine.” He leaned down toward her until his lower lip brushed across both of hers, just barely.

“Maybe I threw the match,” Tesla murmured before he pressed in close, the sound of their thick canvas jackets meeting like sails snapping in the wind.

Tesla could taste the salt on his skin and felt their combined heat from the two hours of fencing. Only a moment ago all she had wanted was a shower, but not anymore. The warmth of the room, the demands of his mouth, that strange
pulling
sensation she’d first experienced last summer, the bead of sweat she felt trickle down between her shoulder blades, her thigh muscles that trembled from the intense workout suggested something else entirely. She had forgotten this—forgotten the heat, the taste of him—

Finn put his hands on either side of her face for the briefest of moments—a surprisingly gentle gesture—and then broke away and stepped back, his hands falling reluctantly to his sides. His eyes were intense, molten gold-brown with desire, but when he spoke, it was with a studied nonchalance.

“Good session,” he said lightly as he gathered his things and headed for the stairs. “You’re formidable, Abbott.”

What the hell
? Tesla thought when he was gone.
I thought he’d decided we were just friends now—he needs to make up his mind.
She shoved her jacket into her gym bag with more force than necessary and started for the stairs, remembering only when she was halfway home that despite Finn’s unexpected kiss, and the maelstrom of confusion it had whipped up for her, it was Sam she had a date with that night.

CHAPTER 3

“You’re in trouble,” said Max as Tesla walked in the front door. His smirk gave his tousled red hair and wire-framed glasses a more impish look than usual.

“Why?” Tesla asked her little brother as she put her gym bag down by the door. “What did I do?”

Max shrugged and returned his attention to the book in his hands. Chaucer, Tesla could see by the gilt letters embossed on the spine. She grinned, despite herself.
The little geek
.

“You should have been home an hour ago,” Max said, his eyes on the page.

“Don’t tell me what to do, Max,” she warned.

“Dad said it, not me.”

“Well, you can tell Dad that I have a job, and part of my job is training. Both of which he already knows,” Tesla said, her jaw now tight and uncomfortable. When Aunt Jane had offered her the job back in August her dad had protested at first, but Aunt Jane had gotten him to agree eventually. Tesla hadn’t been privy to their conversations, but whatever arguments her mom’s old college roommate—and career spy, as it turned out—had used, they had done the trick.

“Tell him yourself,” said Max, no longer interested.

What’s Dad’s problem now
? Tesla wondered after she’d showered and slipped on well-worn boyfriend jeans and her new favorite T-shirt from an eighties Rolling Stones concert tour. She and her father had enjoyed a much-improved relationship for a total of three days after he’d been rescued from Sebastian Nilsen, a bat-shit crazy physicist who hated Greg Abbott and was willing to do anything to get his hands on her parents’ experimental work with time travel. But it hadn’t lasted. Somehow, things at home had settled right back into their familiar pattern.

Those three days had been wonderful, though—Tesla and Max and their dad, holed up in the house, sometimes with Aunt Jane, had talked, laughed and even cried on occasion as they reveled in a togetherness they had never before experienced. All because they had nearly lost one of their own—again.

Why can’t we get along when we’re not in catastrophe mode
? Tesla thought.

For that brief, happy time last summer they had all felt a shell-shocked kind of gratitude, and an unfamiliar need to talk, to explain to each other all that had happened, again and again. Greg Abbott’s kidnapping, the insane fact that Tesla could travel back in time through her parents’ time machine because of her unique, arrhythmic heartbeat, which her mother had used to calibrate the machine just before she’d died. It had been amazing, everyone talking, and listening—it seemed they would never tire of it. At the end of those first few days, however, the communication, the closeness, it just—stopped.

There was nothing left to say.

It wasn’t until much, much later that Tesla realized they had discussed the time travel machine, and what had happened with Tesla when she made the jumps, how she and Max had felt, how they’d coped, the ways in which Aunt Jane and the others had been so vitally important—even Lydia, the agent they’d trusted and who in the end had betrayed them all. But they had never—not once—discussed Nilsen in any meaningful way, nor did Tesla ever ask her father about Nilsen’s unthinkable accusation that there had been no car accident and it was Greg Abbott himself who was responsible for his wife’s death eight years earlier.

Dr. Abbott had gone back to work—his own work, as well as his duties as the new Director of the Institute for Experimental Physics—and Max got serious about his summer reading list. Tesla accepted Aunt Jane’s offer of an after-school job as an official member of the team, and spent the rest of the summer in a kind of secret-agent orientation—as had Bizzy, Joley, and Finn—even Beckett. Jane Doane ran a much tighter ship than Lydia ever had, and that meant they had to read field manuals, memorize protocols, and begin serious physical training. At this point, a couple of months in, they all worked as hard as Beckett did—or at least as often. They weren’t on assignment at the moment (Joley said it was the off-season in espionage, when spies went on holiday). Every afternoon after school they fenced or kick boxed, did CrossFit routines or lifted weights, did resistance or speed training, and it was beginning to pay off in specific skill improvements, but especially in general fitness. Even as a runner and a sometimes-basketball player, Tesla had never been in such good shape.

Weaponry was one of their key skill sets, of course. They all went to the gun range Lydia had constructed within half the basement of the giant old house, where they disassembled, reassembled, and loaded various firearms to see who was faster. When they moved to actual target practice, Tesla was excused—she still couldn’t bring herself to fire a gun, and she had no idea why. She had discussed it with Beckett once, had asked the deadly blonde why she was okay with guns when it was Beckett who had been shot the previous summer. It seemed much more reasonable that
she
would be the one to avoid guns, not Tesla. But Beckett had merely shrugged and told Tesla that she intended to become a world-class markswoman precisely
because
she’d been shot. It didn’t make sense to Tesla, but there it was.

When the others went to the range, Tesla worked with her hands, instead. She had found it hilarious that her instructor was a retired circus performer, but only until she had seen what the woman could do with a set of throwing knives. Tesla could juggle, throw, catch, and put a spin on just about anything she was strong enough to lift off the ground, and—of course—her aim was perfection.

Finally refreshed after the intensity of the afternoon’s workout, Tesla wandered downstairs for a drink, her hair still wet from the shower. She had almost two hours to kill before she had to meet Sam at the movies. It was, technically, a date, but they weren’t “dating.” She’d made that clear to Sam a long time ago, told him they needed to be friends first, and he was pretty good about it—he hadn’t even tried to kiss her again since that time at his house last summer when her dad was still missing. Still, she felt like she had to keep her guard up—he was intense and pretty straightforward about his feelings and, well, who wouldn’t like that? She was flattered, as well as tempted; the guy was undeniably attractive.

The backdoor opened as Tesla’s head was buried in the refrigerator, and she felt her body tense involuntarily. By the time she emerged, her expression was carefully blank, and she turned to face her father.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hi, honey.” He put his briefcase and keys on the kitchen counter by the door, then his eyes widened as he registered what she wore. “Where did you get that shirt?” he asked abruptly.

Tesla was surprised. “This? I found it in one of those old boxes in the attic—you know, Mom’s stuff.”

“I don’t want you snooping around in her things.” He was agitated, inexplicably angry, and Tesla was immediately angry in return.

“
Snooping around in her things
?” she repeated, incredulous. “She wasn’t just your wife, you know. She was my mom. I have a right to see her things—which is the only way I can get a sense of who she was, since you won’t talk about her.”

“Tesla, I just don’t want—these things will stir up painful memories for you,” he said, but his careful, reasoning tone infuriated her, like she was a mental patient or something and needed to be
handled
.

Her anger—and something much, much uglier—immediately rose to the surface. “Oh, of course, if we don’t talk about her and she’s just a big blank spot in my mind I obviously won’t be pained by the fact that I don’t have a mom. Thanks for sparing me that.”

“Look, of course I know you’ve suffered a loss, you and Max both, but your sarcasm doesn’t help. I haven’t been through all those things myself and I’m not sure what’s in there. That’s all I meant. I don’t think you need any more…surprises.”

“Surprises—are you
kidding
me?? Anything beyond the color of her eyes is going to be a surprise since I have so few memories of her—which is another thing that doesn’t make any sense. People remember stuff from when they were five, six years old—lots of people. I’ve got nothing but some crappy old T-shirt she liked a million years ago, and I can’t even have that??”

“That’s not what I meant,” her father snapped.

“Isn’t it?” Tesla felt her heart race. She felt both fear and anger, and the toxic result of that particular combination was absolute recklessness. “What are you afraid of? What do you think I might find—some indication of how she actually died?”

A beat passed, and then another as they stared at each other, shocked.

“What did you say?” Greg Abbott whispered.

A part of Tesla wished she could take it back, wished she’d never said it, but only a part of her. The anger that licked along her veins could not be ignored. There was no stopping what had been set in motion.

“You refuse to say anything more than that there was some vague, generic car crash,” Tesla said all in a rush, her words coming out fast and loud as she hurled them at her father. “Why? Sebastian Nilsen said there was no car accident—he said her death was your fault!”

It was out there, in the room now. Tesla took a step back, as if she could distance herself from the words she’d spoken, could somehow unsee her father’s face drain of color, the unguarded pain in his eyes, and something else that she didn’t recognize, wouldn’t recognize. This was the one event from last summer she hadn’t told anyone—especially her father: that Sebastian Nilsen had accused Greg Abbott of the death of Tasya Petrova, had accused his old rival of killing Tesla’s mother, the woman they had both loved.

Greg Abbott’s hand shook as he raised it to gently push his glasses up higher on his nose, a gesture so exactly like his son’s that he looked, for a moment, the same age as Max. “I—I didn’t think you would give credence to anything Bas Nilsen had to say. Or that you could think this of me.”

“No, it’s not that, exactly—” Tesla began, but stopped, not altogether sure what it
was
, if not that.

Her father walked away but stopped at the kitchen door and spoke without turning around. “Things are never as black and white, never as simple, as we’d like them to be. And neither are people.” There was a pause that seemed packed with meaning that she could not decipher. “Even the ones we love the most.”

Tesla stood a moment longer in the kitchen after he’d disappeared upstairs, until the cold air from the still-open refrigerator reminded her to shut the door. She walked slowly up the stairs, past her father’s closed door and the awful silence that emanated from his bedroom. In her own room, she changed her clothes to go meet Sam while she savagely berated herself for her inability to self-censor, to think before she spoke. She always managed to make every situation worse.

Let’s see, Max is mad, and Dad is crushed and disappointed in me. I guess my work here is done
, she thought bitterly as she dressed all in black to suit her mood. She pulled on a soft, fringed wool tunic with long belled sleeves and a deeply cowled hood like a monk’s, thick, ribbed sweater-leggings and flat, slouchy boots before she left the house. It was only when she got to the square in town and saw the bright lights around the theater’s marquee that she stopped the self-hate long enough to realize that her father had managed to avoid her questions about her mom and left her frustrated, with no answers, yet again.

Tesla looked up at the clock tower in the town square to check the time—she was twenty minutes early for her date with Sam—and had just decided to get a coffee when someone laid a hand on her shoulder.

Startled, she spun around to find Finn, who took a step back to widen the gap between them to exactly two feet eleven inches, she noted instantly.

“You really have to stop following me, Abbott. It’s getting embarrassing,” he said. His cocked eyebrow and lopsided, derisive grin were calculated for maximum aggravation.

Caught off guard, and apparently still unsettled by the kiss they’d shared earlier, Tesla decided a good offense was, after all, the best defense. “You wish.

Really? That’s your stinging rebuttal?
she berated herself silently.

Finn laughed. “Well, I wish a lot of things, but I’m not sure you following me made the cut.”

Annnnd, there it was, his endless amusement at her expense.

“I have a date—what’s your excuse?” she demanded hotly. “Maybe
you’re
following
me
.”

His smile never wavered, but there was a faint, barely detectable…
tightening
about him. His lips, his warm brown eyes, the arms hanging loosely at his side—they hadn’t changed, not really, but his focus on her now seemed hard and bright, no longer lazy. She didn’t really see the shift, she just…
felt
it.

“That’s kind of cute,” he said, his tone pitch-perfect, making Tesla think she’d imagined some change in him. “Some nice boy at school taking you to homecoming?”

“It’s got nothing to do with school. I’m going out with Sam.” She said it with a shrug, even contemplated interrupting herself with a yawn to indicate the depth of her complete boredom, but she just wasn’t as good at this as Finn.