The Tesla Legacy Read online

  Her brain was not her friend.

  Lucy dropped to a squat and checked for an outlet or a transformer or anything that would explain the reaction of the Tesla lamp. Anything besides her nervous system choosing the worst possible moment to go completely haywire.

  Don’t panic. You’re a scientist. You can figure this out.

  Could she? The simplest explanation would be that she was about to have the mother of all seizures.

  She needed to get out of here. She needed to call for help—even if it meant being arrested. Lucy leapt up at a sudden cracking sound and bashed her forehead against the desk. Ouch.

  She blinked, mouth falling open.

  No way. A small recess had appeared in the interior wall beside the doorway, running from floor to ceiling. Was New York due for an earthquake Lucy hadn’t been aware of? If that was a structural wall, the whole building might be on the brink of collapse. Her eyes did a quick sweep of the room. Nothing else was out of place. On closer inspection, Lucy realized the line of the recess was perfectly straight.

  In fact, it was a door.

  Curiosity beat out fear and she stepped closer.

  Lucy swung her gaze back to the Tesla lamp. It was dark. No thin fingers of light. Dormant.

  Pressure began to build at the front of her skull. Had she just hallucinated? But the door was real. Right?

  Put your hypothesis to the test.

  Objective. Rational. Calculating. Those were the attributes Lucy needed now.

  Tentatively, with two fingers, she pushed against the opening. It deepened. Down the rabbit hole or bust.

  Darkness enveloped Lucy as she crossed the threshold. There was no longer carpeting beneath her feet, just concrete. She could feel the hair on her arms begin to rise. A faint buzz filled her ears like television static.

  The noise increased with each step she took. Overhead lights flickered. Lucy’s seizures had never been provoked by strobing, and she crossed her fingers it wouldn’t start now. The flickering ceased and she saw a few bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

  They must have been motion activated. Nothing exceptional about—

  Lucy’s train of thought stopped short as she studied her new surroundings. She was standing inside a time capsule. A thick layer of dust covered everything: an antique wooden swivel chair. An old-timey radio—the kind from World War II movies. The equally vintage-looking worktable covered with metal coils, pliers, and other spare parts. In the center of the table was a large glass dome. The bottom had been carved from wood and wrapped with yet more copper wire.

  All of this stuff looked like it had been around long before motion sensors were invented. And the room looked like it hadn’t seen the light of day since.

  This was way more than Lucy had bargained for when she boarded the train this morning.

  Could her dad know about the hidden room? Was this the real reason the address had been encrypted in the photograph? Lucy refused to believe that she of all people might actually have uncovered Tesla’s private laboratory. But if her dad were aware of its existence, it didn’t seem like he—or anyone else—had been inside for decades.

  She should leave. Really. She should leave right now. The pressure behind her eyes and the annoying gnat-like noise in her ears became amplified every second she remained. And yet some part of her was urging her to stay.

  A weakening self-preservation instinct forced her eyes to seek out the exit.

  Oh frak. All at once Lucy realized she wasn’t standing inside a room.

  She was standing inside a cage.

  Copper mesh lined the walls and ceiling. Maybe Lucy hadn’t been so far off about finding a conspiracy-theory nut. The mesh would prevent any electrical signals from getting in or out, making it the ultimate defense against hackers.

  A member of Lucy’s computer forum—Snowden4Ever—had been building a cage like this because he thought the NSA was spying on him. It was known as a Faraday cage after the Englishman who pioneered the field of electromagnetism. Hackers were a digital problem, however, and the tech in this room was analog.

  What had Tesla been trying to protect?

  The buzzing in Lucy’s cranium intensified until her teeth chattered. Her black curls floated up from her shoulders, haloing her face like a model in a music video, but not in a good way. More like Medusa.

  She did the opposite of what logic dictated.

  Gripped by curiosity and something more—more than fascination, more like something she had lost that was desperate to be found—Lucy zigzagged her forefinger down the dome, drawing a lightning bolt in the dust. Sparks zipped from her fingertip up her arm. These sparks were different from her typical pre-seizure prickles.

  They made Lucy feel alive. Invincible.

  A strange kind of peace settled over her as she lifted up the glass to reveal a copper egg. An egg? Lucy frowned. This had to be the most messed-up Easter-egg hunt ever.

  Lucy found it increasingly difficult to think straight. Sparks transformed into tingles throughout her body. The floor rocked beneath her. She reached toward the egg, unable to stop herself, and it began to spin. Faster and faster, until it was totally upright.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind it occurred to Lucy that the egg shouldn’t be able to spin without an active electromagnetic field. And an electromagnetic field couldn’t be created without a power supply.

  Her body relaxed in a way Lucy had never known. She was floating. Hovering outside herself. Which might be why Lucy wasn’t terrified when she saw the egg rise off the platform, levitating to eye level.

  Faster, faster. She wanted to hold it in her hand.

  The instant she made contact, a green flame engulfed Lucy’s hand, spreading to her elbow, then her shoulder.

  There was no pain. She watched herself burning but she felt nothing. Release: Years of constant worry and agony burning off her. Evaporating like mist.

  She smiled as the emerald fire coated her cheeks.

  Bringing the egg toward her heart, Lucy’s entire body convulsed as if she’d been struck by lightning. Sparks flew behind her eyes. She became the lightning.

  Darkness fell.

  OMG

  “Bozhe moy.”

  Lucy’s eyes flipped open, a stranger’s face looming above her. It took a moment for Lucy to focus. Why did she look so familiar? Oh, she’d stolen her key card. Techno blasted from the headphones around the maid’s neck. Not what Lucy needed. Her head pounded like she’d been on a bender.

  “Bozhe moy,” the maid repeated. Was that Russian?

  Lucy sat up like a shot as panic hit. She was on the floor. She was on the floor of the New Yorker Hotel.

  Holy crap. Her days as a free woman were over. Charges of destruction of private property would be added to burglary. Not that she’d stolen anything. She twisted her torso in the direction of Tesla’s secret lab. How would she explain that to the NYPD?

  Lucy gasped. The door was gone. As if it had never been there. Had it?

  She panned her gaze across the walls—the seamless beige wallpaper—and anxiety rose in her chest like a tsunami.

  A gentle hand grazed her brow; Lucy rocked backward.

  “You … okay?” the maid asked, face pinched with concern, crow’s feet gathering around her shock-filled eyes. “I thought you … dead. Bozhe moy.”

  Lucy forced an inappropriately cheery smile. “Not dead,” she said. Although her parents would kill her if they ever learned what she’d been up to.

  Pulling back her hand, the other woman’s attitude grew more leery.

  “Fever?”

  Lucy sensed the relief the maid felt at the strange girl on the bedroom floor still having a pulse was dissipating and rapidly being replaced with well-founded suspicion. She needed to come up with a credible story to keep the woman from calling hotel security. Fast. Unfortunately, two heavyweight champions had just gone ten rounds inside her skull.

  “No fever,” Lucy replied.

  She hated to do this, it w
ent against every fiber of her being, but she raised her left arm slowly. A silver bracelet dangled from her wrist. From a distance it looked like a regular charm bracelet: a tiny Eiffel Tower, a shooting star, a four-leaf clover. On the center charm, however, there was no mistaking the bright-red lettering.

  MEDIC ALERT. EPILEPSY.

  Claudia added the charms as a surprise right before Lucy started at Eaton High. Wearing the bracelet had been one of her parents’ conditions for letting her attend. Her bestie understood better than anyone Lucy’s need not to be defined by the label that already determined too much of her life. Claudia had done such a clever job at camouflaging it that most of the time Lucy could forget it was anything but a charm bracelet.

  She had promised herself she would never use her condition as a get-out-of-jail-free card. But that was precisely what she was doing now.

  The familiar combination of pity and a trace of fear flitted through the other woman’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said, talking a mile a minute. “The concierge let me in. I must have had a seizure.” She rubbed her temples for emphasis. “I’m so embarrassed.” When had lying become so easy for Lucy?

  Before the maid could answer, she continued, “Could I borrow your phone, please?” Lucy pointed at the phone peeking out from her apron pocket. “I need to call someone to meet me.”

  “Da.” She handed over the phone as gingerly as if Lucy were an unexploded bomb.

  To be fair, her hands were trembling. She inhaled a deep breath and dialed.

  It seemed like forever before anyone answered. Lucy’s eyes strayed toward the window. The sun was much lower in the sky.

  “Hello?” came a skeptical voice on the other end of the line. Warmth spread through Lucy at the sound. Claudia always made her feel like things would be all right.

  “Clauds, it’s me. Lucy.”

  “Luce? Why are you calling me from this number?”

  “Broke my phone.”

  “Again?” Claudia laughed. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Still in the city. I’m gonna catch the next train. Could you get me at the station?”

  There was a pause. Claudia could read Lucy too well. If she was calling for chauffeur service it meant something was wrong. Lucy was fiercely stubborn about riding her bike everywhere.

  “Are you okay, Luce?”

  No. Not at all. “Just a little lightheaded.”

  Lucy could picture Claudia’s head bob. She never judged Lucy or made her feel limited, which was why Claudia was the only person she opened up to about her condition.

  “Okay,” replied her friend. “The Mystery Minivan will be waiting. With bells on.”

  Only Claudia could make Lucy smile at a time like this. Claudia had a thing for Scooby-Doo. She had also inherited the minivan from her three older brothers, so the mystery was how it could still be in one piece.

  “Love you, Clauds.” Lucy tried to keep her tone breezy as she hung up. Glancing at the maid, whose expression was still panicked, she said, “Thank you,” and the phone slipped from her sweaty fingers.

  “Welcome,” the woman mumbled, brow furrowed.

  Lucy scrambled to her feet. She needed to skedaddle before the woman changed her mind and decided to alert the authorities.

  Her hand was on the doorknob when she heard, “Wait—”

  Lucy froze. She pictured the disappointment on her mother’s face as she received a call from the police.

  “Your bag?”

  The maid held out a beat-up messenger bag branded with an OMg (oxygen, magnesium) bumper sticker. Like everything else, it had totally slipped Lucy’s mind. She wouldn’t get far without her wallet.

  Cheeks sizzling, Lucy thanked the woman again, shouldered her bag, and hightailed it out of there.

  After making her way downstairs, she stepped out onto the chaotic city street and rubbed her bracelet, unable to suppress a smile. Lucy’s shoulders curled forward as she exhaled.

  She’d made a clean getaway.

  GREASED LIGHTNIN’

  The high from Lucy’s great escape didn’t last. As the Metro-North chugged along, the skyscrapers becoming pinpricks against the rose-colored horizon, a sick feeling settled over her. She laid her head back on the pleather seat and tried to sort through what the frak had just happened.

  Lucy divided the events into what she knew to be true and what she hoped wasn’t.

  True: She had successfully broken into the Tesla Suite at the New Yorker Hotel.

  Possibly true: There was some kind of link between her father’s company and Tesla’s inventions.

  All her life, Lucy’s dad had taught her the history of science, regaled her with tales of the first great thinkers. Thales of Miletu, who’d accurately predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BCE. Copernicus, who challenged an Earth-centered model of the universe. Aside from Claudia, these were Lucy’s heroes. She had clung to dates and facts for safety when she couldn’t even trust her own body not to betray her.

  So why had her father always treated Tesla like a footnote?

  Hopefully not true: Lucy’s brain had just misfired at Mount Vesuvius levels. There was no way she could tell her parents what happened or the light at the end of the tunnel—college—would wink out of existence. They’d never let her leave home and she really would become a cat lady.

  Couldn’t possibly be true: Lucy’s blood had activated a plasma lamp designed by Tesla to open a door to a secret laboratory, which was further shielded by a Faraday cage because Tesla wanted to protect its contents from prying eyes. Chiefly, perhaps, the bronze egg that spun of its own accord due to an unspecified electromagnetic field.

  Hopefully not true: When Lucy touched the egg it triggered a seizure—possibly a stroke—and Lucy passed out.

  True: Lucy couldn’t remember anything between touching the egg and waking up on the hotel-room floor.

  True: The room looked spotless and no one would ever believe there was a laboratory hidden within the walls of the New Yorker Hotel.

  Really couldn’t possibly be true: Both the Tesla lamp and the Tesla Egg needed a power source to activate but neither had one. Both remained inert until Lucy made contact.

  If there was no other power source … then Lucy was the power source …

  She bolted from her seat, ducked into the toilet at the back of the carriage, and promptly tossed her cookies. Actually, not cookies. Breakfast had been a cappuccino and half a bagel. No lunch. Mostly, she dry-heaved. Lucy slumped against the grimy wall, quivering, and slid down to the even filthier floor. She tucked her knees into her chest and let the train rock her in the fetal position.

  Lucy’s logic had morphed from the improbable to the truly ridiculous. A human body couldn’t generate electrical power like that. It used electrical signals in the nerves and the brain. These conducted electricity but were fragile. Too much or too little, and the nervous system went on the fritz: heart attacks, seizures, strokes. Lucy knew that all too well. The mere suggestion was ludicrous. What she was considering would short-circuit her heart, and barbecue her brain—whatever was left of it anyway.

  She snorted. Lucy was inventing a fantasy because she didn’t want to admit to herself that the new medication might have stopped working. That this could be the harbinger of things to come.

  Don’t catastrophize, she scolded herself, edging her way upright. This could have been a one-off. It could.

  A meager trickle dribbled from the faucet as Lucy turned the tap. She cupped her hands and brushed the cold water across her face.

  Lucy’s reflection in the vaguely warped mirror stared back at her in accusation. Her hair looked like she’d walked through a wind tunnel and then been tumbled-dried for good measure. Her skin was zombie white and her red-rimmed irises were more lead than silver.

  What was she going to tell Claudia?

  Shakily, she shut off the tap. Pull it together. Giving herself a final look in the mirror, Lucy raised her chin and returned to her seat just as the co
nductor announced Eaton was the next stop.

  She would put this whole “Lucy Takes Manhattan” misadventure out of her mind. She would forget she’d ever deciphered the message. Liber Librum Aperit: It was probably nothing more than an in-joke between her dad and his colleagues anyway. They were all still nerds, even if they wore expensive suits. Lucy would close this particular book.

  If the security guard at her dad’s office building ever mentioned Lucy’s visit, she would be in enough trouble with her parents as it was.

  Digging around her bag for a comb or tissues or maybe Tic Tacs, her hand closed around cold, smooth metal. Heat raced up her arm and she dropped the egg into the abyss of her book bag with a shock.

  It was real.

  The Tesla Egg was real, not just a product of Lucy’s fevered imagination. The Tesla Egg was real and she had stolen it.

  At least it wasn’t levitating in the middle of a commuter train.

  “Eaton Station!” the loudspeaker blared.

  A scream battled its way up her throat, but Lucy wouldn’t let it out. She didn’t know if it was a scream of joy or terror. While the Tesla Egg was proof that she hadn’t hallucinated the entire afternoon, it was also proof that something far stranger than a seizure was going on.

  But proof of what exactly?

  Could her dad truly have known about Tesla’s secret laboratory? Lucy didn’t see a way to ask him about the Sapientia Group’s connection to the scientist without revealing what had happened to her. And she didn’t know for a fact that it was anything in Tesla’s lab that had triggered Lucy’s response. It could be coincidental, not causal. Why was this happening? She already lived her life under her parents’ high-intensity microscope; she didn’t want to make it worse for herself.

  Breathe, Luce.

  Lucy spotted the Mystery Minivan already idling in the parking lot beside the train tracks and made a beeline from the platform. She also couldn’t miss Claudia’s Orphan Annie–red hair or supernova of freckles if she tried.

  Claudia didn’t give Lucy a chance to buckle her seat belt before crushing her into a bear hug. Well, given her friend’s size, it was more like a teddy-bear hug.