The Tesla Legacy Read online

  “Lucinda Minerva Phelps,” she said formally. Face-palm. Why had she given her middle name? She hated it. Minerva was what you got saddled with when your mother studied ancient poetry for a living.

  The man huffed a small laugh. “Phelps? Dr. Victor Phelps’s daughter?”

  “The one and only,” Lucy answered, smiling awkwardly. Then a disturbing thought struck her. What if the evil-twin scenario was right?

  “I’m afraid you just missed him.”

  “I did?”

  “He jumped in a cab for JFK about fifteen minutes ago.”

  The airport?

  “Oh,” said Lucy. Why hadn’t her dad mentioned he was going on yet another business trip? “You’re sure it was Dr. Phelps?”

  “’Fraid so. His March Madness picks are terrible,” said the man with another laugh, and indicated the sports page. Drawing his brows together, he said, “Your dad didn’t know you were coming?”

  “No, um, I wanted to surprise him.” She shrugged to mask her nerves. “I guess the surprise is on me.”

  “Shame. Try him on his cell?”

  “I will. Thanks.” Dejected, Lucy turned on her heel and walked back out onto the street. She stared blankly at the passing traffic.

  It wasn’t totally out of the ordinary for her dad to drop everything and hop on a plane, but today of all days it galled her. She’d come into the city for nothing. Lucy could call him, of course, but this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have over the phone.

  She needed to look her father in the eye.

  Someone leaned on a car horn, and Lucy flinched. She clenched her fists.

  Maybe her trip didn’t have to be for nothing. There was another clue contained in the photo, after all.

  Thirty-fourth and Eighth: the New Yorker Hotel. It was only about a mile away.

  Lucy glanced at the entrance to the subway on the opposite corner and heard her mother’s litany of potential seizure triggers loop at the back of her mind. But she wanted answers, and she wanted them now.

  The sun was shining; Lucy would walk. She pulled up a map on her phone and retraced her steps toward Grand Central, kept going past the terminal until she hit Thirty-fourth Street, and then turned west.

  She was so busy following her own blue dot on the map that she nearly missed it: the Empire State Building. Lucy sighed.

  Gazing up with a goofy grin was a stupid, touristy thing to do, but she couldn’t help herself. The midmorning light hit the spire at the top so that it glowed like burnished silver. Another sigh. The romantic in Lucy saw it as a lighthouse, a beacon drawing all the fearless dreamers to the city.

  Slam!

  Lucy toppled to the sidewalk, bracing herself with her left hand, and sliced her palm on a sliver of glass. The phone in her right hand took the brunt of her weight.

  “Hey, watch it, lady!” snarled a preteen on a skateboard sporting a backwards Yankees baseball cap.

  Lady? Did Lucy look like a lady? She was eighteen, not thirty-five!

  “You watch it,” Lucy called after him, but the brat was long gone, sailing down Fifth Avenue.

  And her cell phone was smashed beyond repair.

  Expletive. Expletive. Expletive.

  This wasn’t Lucy’s first cellular mishap. She was plagued by nonexistent battery life and power surges—although they mostly remained in one piece. Her parents would simply take this as further evidence of her helplessness.

  Go home, taunted a turncoat voice. This is no place for you.

  Rage bubbled up in Lucy’s chest. She’d already come this far; she wouldn’t back down now. Wiping her bloody palm against her jeans, she continued down the long crosstown blocks that led toward the Hudson River.

  As she reached Eighth Avenue multiple towers rose before Lucy’s eyes, stacked on top of one another like a LEGO set; the architecture looked to be from the same era as her father’s office building and the Empire State.

  What was so special about the New Yorker Hotel? It couldn’t be as simple as her father having an affair, could it?

  Only one way to find out.

  Lucy crossed the street, barely avoiding a taxi that might as well be racing in the Indy 500, and was sucked into a whirlwind of frazzled tourists checking in and checking out, carts of luggage, and screeching children. She rubbed her temples again and surveyed the lobby. Admiring the gilded ceiling and mammoth crystal chandelier, Lucy got on line for the concierge. She tried not to eavesdrop on the Midwestern couple ahead of her who were arguing about the exorbitant price of theatre tickets.

  Where had her dad jetted off to? Lucy wondered. Did her mom know?

  “Can I help you?”

  An irritated voice cut into her stream of consciousness. “Um, hi,” Lucy replied. She hadn’t noticed the other couple walk away.

  “Hi.” The concierge was a woman in her mid-fifties with dyed-blond hair shellacked to within an inch of its life, overly tweezed eyebrows, and a grimace that said she had no time to waste.

  Lucy hadn’t thought through what she was going to say but “3327,” flew out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

  The concierge raised a pencil-thin eyebrow.

  “The Tesla Suite.”

  “Tesla? Like the car?” Lucy wrinkled her nose. Was Elon Musk a frequent guest?

  The woman gave Lucy a once-over. “Tesla as in Nikola Tesla, the famous inventor who lived in room 3327.” Her words dripped with disdain.

  “Right.” Of course. Lucy had heard of him but … “Wait,” she blurted, stomach flip-flopping. “His name was Nikola?”

  “That’s what I said,” the concierge said flatly, and Lucy willed away the tension traveling from her shoulders to her neck. She’d known the electric cars had been named in his honor but she’d forgotten his first name.

  Could the Nikola in the message refer to Tesla rather than Lucy? But that still didn’t explain the connection to her father.

  “I’d like to see the room, if that’s okay,” she said.

  The concierge twitched her nose as she tapped on her keyboard. “The Tesla Suite is available. How would you like to pay?”

  Pay? Lucy had fifty bucks in her wallet and she doubted that would cover it.

  “Could I just take a look around? See if I want to book it in the future?” She refused to be intimidated by a woman with alien eyebrows. “My father does a lot of business in the city,” she added. Yeah, that sounded plausible.

  The concierge canted her head, smiled broadly, and enjoyed saying, “No.” Then she looked straight through Lucy to the elderly woman behind her. “How can I help you, ma’am?”

  A flush worked its way from Lucy’s cheeks down her neck. Unceremoniously dismissed, she retreated toward the elevator bank to consider her options.

  ACCESS CARD REQUIRED declared an officious sign.

  Fantastic. Lucy needed to get into that room. She needed to understand the link between her dad and a long-dead scientist.

  In her peripheral vision, Lucy spotted a bellhop helping a large family with their bags into the elevator and, with a sudden burst of moxie, she darted into the center of them. She was tired of playing everything by the book, always asking permission, never stepping out of her comfort zone.

  “Thirty-three, please,” she called out as the elevator doors slid shut, hazarding a guess that Room 3327 would be located on the thirty-third floor.

  A long moment passed.

  With a huff, much to Lucy’s relief, the bellhop swiped his card and hit the button.

  Her thundering heart slowed.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  BRAVE NEW WORLD

  The elevator dinged to announce Lucy’s destination.

  Like any good scientist, she accepted that she lived in an uncertain universe, but whatever she discovered in the Tesla Suite might turn hers completely on its head. As Lucy hesitated, the doors started to swish closed.

  “Thirty-third floor,” said the bellhop with a hint of irritation, shooting out a h
and to block the sensor. The doors jolted open again, and a shudder passed through her.

  Be brave, Luce.

  “Thanks.” Her reply was sheepish as she wedged herself through the grouchy, probably jet-lagged family, to the front of the elevator.

  The bellhop gave her a perfunctory, “Enjoy your stay,” as the doors closed once more, whisking them onward and upward.

  Lucy stepped onto a hideous brown carpet. The diamond pattern was enough to make her head spin. She very much doubted she would enjoy her stay.

  Steeling herself, she glanced around the corridor. All was quiet except for the humming elevator banks.

  Sleuthing wasn’t exactly a specialty of Lucy’s—nothing worth investigating happened in the town of Eaton—so she would approach the situation like one of her experiments. She had already completed step one by gaining access to the thirty-third floor; step two was getting into the room.

  Strawberry suddenly coated her tongue.

  This could not be happening now. Lucy was not having the beginning of a sensory seizure in the middle of a Manhattan hotel hallway.

  It had been exactly eighteen months and twenty-one days since she’d smelled or tasted anything that wasn’t real. Ever since her neurologist had switched her onto a new medication. Lucy knew the precise date because she kept her own detailed records. She’d started her “Brain Journals” when she was eight (hence the imaginative title) and they allowed her the illusion of control.

  Lucy’s symptoms had never conformed to any standard type of epilepsy but that didn’t stop her from trying to catch something the doctors had missed.

  Sweat beaded across her hairline. You can do this. It was almost convincing.

  Methodically, Lucy put one foot in front of the other. The white walls and cognac-colored carpet made the narrow corridor appear tunnel-like: a journey to the center of the earth. As she propelled herself to the end of the hallway, the taste of strawberries mercifully faded.

  The door to Room 3327 was adorned with a brass plaque.

  The Tesla Suite.

  Embedded into the shiny metal were two black-and-white photographs. A mustachioed man in his thirties stared out of the first, stark angular cheeks leading to lips lifted in a barely discernible smirk. His expression intimated that he was in on some cosmic joke—and you weren’t.

  In the second photo to the left of the engraved room number, bolts of lightning surged toward an enormous cylindrical coil. The streaks writhed in the air like the tentacles of a humongous sea creature. The sort Captain Nemo would battle.

  Here lived Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla from 1933 until his death in 1943, read the inscription on the plaque.

  Lucy perused the list of Tesla’s achievements embossed in brass. He was the inventor of AC electrical power as well as the generator and motor. Not to mention designing the electrical power plant at Niagara Falls and patenting wireless communication.

  What could be the link between Tesla’s inventions and her father’s company?

  The Sapientia Group invested primarily in tech start-ups. It scoured the globe looking for the next Steve Jobs working out of his basement in Kuala Lumpur or Johannesburg. Surely any patents Tesla held were long-since outdated? He had died before the Cold War even started.

  And why encrypt an address that was public knowledge? Especially in a photo of Lucy?

  She had to get onto the other side of that door.

  Lucy jiggled the knob. Another electronic keycard was required. If only she’d brought a Taser with her instead of pepper spray for protection in the Bad Apple, she could fry the circuitry. She slapped her palm against the plaque with a grunt of frustration.

  Footsteps. Crap. Her entire body tensed. They got closer. Keeping her breathing as calm as possible, Lucy pressed herself into the opposite doorframe and tried to calculate whether the angle would be sufficient to obscure her from view.

  Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.

  A housekeeper pushed a cleaning trolley toward her. In a stroke of luck, the woman wore massive headphones, dancing the way you do when no one’s around, while her eyes remained simultaneously glued to the screen of her cell. On autopilot she grabbed a handful of mini-toiletries, parked the cart, swiped a card, and shook her moneymaker right into a bedroom a couple doors down.

  Exhale. Lucy’s shoulders sagged.

  The housekeeper hadn’t noticed her, but she did leave the master keycard dangling from the handle of the cart in plain view. The phrase “low-hanging fruit” came to mind.

  Was Lucy really considering what she was considering? Breaking and entering would make a Technicolor addition to her college transcript.

  Taking a page from Cole’s book, Lucy lunged for the cleaning cart, nabbed the keycard, and brushed it against the swipe pad before she could consider the consequences.

  A satisfying click filled her ears as the door unlocked. Lucy tossed the card in the direction of the cart. It landed soundlessly on the carpet. Close enough. Hopefully the maid would think it had simply succumbed to gravity.

  Eyeballing Tesla, Lucy turned the handle and stepped inside.

  Here went nothing.

  GILDED CAGES

  And nothing was what Lucy found.

  Light streamed in through gauzy curtains, slicing the suite in two. The interior was a cornucopia of beige—from the velvet armchair to the drapes to the headboard—that screamed corporate chic, but there was nothing suspicious about that. The immaculate bedroom would delight her mother to no end.

  Lucy’s heart began to sink.

  What had she been expecting to find? Some conspiracy nut’s cat’s cradle of red string and newspaper clippings webbing the walls?

  With a sigh, Lucy crept toward the window. Pulling back the curtain, she pressed her nose against the glass, and wings flapped angrily, rattling it. A pigeon glared at her before flying off.

  Judgmental rats with wings.

  Down below flowed a river of yellow cabs and Teflon-coated New Yorkers charging purposefully toward their destinations. Even from up here, Lucy could feel the thrum and buzz of the city in her bones. Her eyes drifted along the façade of Madison Square Garden and the Corinthian columns of a stately building that reminded her of a Greek temple, before landing once more on the spire where King Kong made his last stand.

  Reluctantly, she turned her back on the cityscape.

  There was no mystery here. Yes, it was weird that there was a message hidden in a photo of Lucy on her dad’s desk, but the Nikola it referenced clearly wasn’t her.

  It was Tesla.

  Maybe the picture was a test balloon? Some kind of trial for an encryption program that the Sapientia Group had financed? Lucy’s father wouldn’t invest in anything without a demonstration. When her dad got back from his business trip, she’d just ask him.

  Although she’d omit her flirtation with a life of crime.

  She looked over her shoulder to catch once last furtive glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. Time to resume her regularly scheduled programming. This entire escapade had effectively distracted Lucy from the fallout of her fight with Cole, but she couldn’t avoid the blast radius forever.

  As Lucy pushed her way out of the curtains, she spied something in her field of vision that didn’t fit with the rest of the business-executive décor.

  Sitting on the desk beside the window was a lamp. But not just any lamp. The base was brass, vintage, like something that belonged in the Victorian-themed Cozy Café on Eaton’s main street. Resting atop the narrow shaft was no regular Philips lightbulb or shade. Instead a large glass sphere balanced in a precarious-looking manner. Lucy might have mistaken it for a crystal ball if not for the copper coil inside.

  Another plaque, similar to the one on the door, was affixed to the base.

  This prototype for his Incandescent Electric Light belonged to Nikola Tesla himself. He invented the plasma lamp after experimenting with the reaction between high-frequency currents and noble gases.

  Lucy understood the basic c
oncept of the plasma lamp. She’d seen something similar in the Natural History Museum once. She bit her lip, excited, the way she did when she was in the final stages of conducting an experiment.

  Plasma was created by pumping a gas full of energy, and it was one of the four fundamental states of matter, making up most of the universe, the stars, and the sun. If Lucy placed a conducting object—like her hand—near the globe, light tendrils would extend toward her as she attracted the current from the inner electrode. In this case, the copper coil. It was like a mini version of the photo showing Tesla surrounded by lightning.

  The idea that matter, like plasma, could be transformed was comforting to Lucy. It meant she could be transformed too.

  Could the Sapientia Group be interested in Tesla’s lamp? Maybe as part of a new green technology? Her dad believed alternative forms of energy were the wave of the future.

  Lucy waggled her fingers, fighting an odd compulsion to touch the glass orb. The prototype didn’t have a power cord, and it needed electrical current to work, but she wanted to touch the globe anyway. She’d never been so close to a tangible piece of scientific history without a display case.

  Feeling like a kid about to blow out her birthday candles, Lucy placed her palm flat on the lamp.

  As expected, nothing happened.

  “Crap.” When she removed her hand, Lucy saw a smear of blood across the glass. The cut must have been deeper than she’d thought.

  She was about to wipe it away when something did happen.

  Blue-white snakes of light connected with Lucy’s smeared blood.

  Which was impossible.

  The lamp needed a power source. The copper coil could only supply a current if it was plugged into the mains.

  Her knees began to quake. She’d never experienced a full-on visual hallucination before a seizure. Why now? If her parents found out, she could kiss college goodbye.

  Lucy jammed her eyes shut. You’re okay, Luce. When she opened her eyes again, the light would be gone.

  Pulse skyrocketing, she opened one eye, then the other.

  The tendrils of blue-white light continued to dance.