The Tesla Legacy Read online

  As Lucy squeezed her back, energy crackled between them, and they broke apart.

  Claudia giggled. “It’s electrifying!” she said, waving jazz hands.

  Lucy wheezed a breathy laugh. Grease had been this year’s musical.

  “Totally shocking,” Lucy agreed.

  Static. Completely run-of-the-mill static electricity. That was it. The separation of positive and negative charges. Electrons moving from Lucy’s Eaton High sweatshirt to Claudia’s hot pink sequined cardigan. Nothing more. Absolutely explainable by the laws of physics.

  Absolutely.

  With a crooked grin, and a glint in her hazel eyes, Claudia nudged her lightly. Zap. Lucy’s chest spasmed as if she’d been shot in the heart.

  “Wow,” her friend teased. “You really are “Greased Lightnin’,” Luce. Must be a storm coming.”

  Invisible fingers tightened around her neck. Lucy had never put much stock in gut feelings—the same way she didn’t believe in Bigfoot or Ouija boards—but she couldn’t shake the feeling that a storm was coming.

  And the storm was her.

  POKER FACE

  No actual storm hit that weekend, but every time Lucy closed her eyes, lightning flashed.

  When she’d gotten home on Saturday night, her mom had no reason to suspect Lucy hadn’t been with Claudia all day long, and Lucy pretended to be surprised to learn that her dad had caught a last-minute flight to Tokyo. Even so, she avoided her mom on Sunday, convinced she would be able to discern something was wrong with her only child.

  Thankfully the security guard didn’t seem to have Lucy’s mom on speed dial.

  Now Monday morning had dawned too soon. She’d slept fitfully last night and remained utterly exhausted. Groggy, Lucy stretched her back like Schrödinger (who hadn’t scratched on her door for his requisite petting) only to discover a golden nimbus glowing around her hands.

  Sunlight. It was only sunlight.

  Lucy hadn’t become a human torch quite yet.

  “Don’t be pathetic,” she muttered.

  Lucy browsed indecisively through the limited wardrobe choices in her closet. Lacking Claudia’s natural flair, Lucy stuck to safe, classic options: sweater twinsets, jeans, ballet flats. She designated her various fandom T-shirts—Battlestar Galactica and Blade Runner—strictly for sleepwear.

  The only rebellion to her preppy uniform was her nail polish. She liked a little bit of glitter. Teaching herself to paint her nails was a not insubstantial triumph. It required a steady hand. Whenever Lucy gave herself a manicure it was incontrovertible evidence that she could control her condition instead of letting it control her.

  Picking absently at chipped purple sparkles, Lucy settled on a jean skirt and a mauve scoop-neck shirt that was lower cut than what she ordinarily wore. It would be a lie to say she didn’t want to make Cole see what he’d been missing all weekend. She side-eyed the varsity track windbreaker hanging on the back of the closet door but opted to leave it there, selecting a corduroy jacket instead.

  The world clock on her night table told Lucy it was 12:45 P.M. in London and 9:45 P.M. in Sydney, which meant it was 7:45 P.M. in the great state of Connecticut. She liked imagining what people were doing in other time zones and promised herself one day she’d live farther than two hours’ drive from her parents’ house. That wasn’t her immediate problem, however. She was going to be late for first period.

  Lucy had never been late to class. Ever.

  Slinging her book bag on one shoulder, she flew down the stairs, nearly drop-kicking Schrödinger. The fur ball hissed at her for all he was worth and scurried in the opposite direction. Strange. Schrödinger never hissed at her.

  As she rushed past the kitchen, Lucy’s mom called out, “If it isn’t Rip Van Winkle! Breakfast?”

  Her mom was seated on a stool, spine totally erect, sipping her tea from a china cup. A portrait of refinement. It was easy to see why Professor Elaine Phelps made freshmen quake in their boots.

  “Can’t,” Lucy said. “Late.” But man, did she crave caffeine.

  Eagle eyes scrutinized her.

  “Do you feel all right? You slept most of yesterday.”

  “Being a teenager isn’t a medical condition, Mom.”

  A wounded look crossed her mother’s face and her cheeks hollowed in a resigned sigh.

  “If you say so.”

  Lucy immediately regretted snapping at her mom when she was already lying to her. “Sorry. Just late,” she said more quietly, then dashed down the hallway and ran out onto the front lawn.

  Hurrying to unlock Marie Curie (whom Claudia had rescued) from where she rested against the garage door, Lucy was too preoccupied to notice Cole’s Jeep parked beside the curb.

  A hand dropped onto Lucy’s shoulder, sending a jolt straight through her. She lost her footing and tipped backward, landing on her butt. Graceful. At least the grass provided a cushion.

  “Lemme help you up,” said Cole, his shadow falling over her.

  Lucy nearly resisted but, to her irritation, she did need help.

  Her wrist was stuck to the bike lock. Or, more specifically, her silver Medic Alert bracelet. Just as if it’d been magnetized.

  “Thanks,” she murmured, and Cole pulled her upright. Ow. It felt like Lucy’s shoulder was being ripped from its socket as her wrist detached from the lock.

  She darted a glance at her book bag, which had also dropped onto the lawn.

  Could the Tesla Egg have magnetized her bracelet?

  Lucy probably should have hidden the egg somewhere in her room, but she was afraid her mom would find it and ask her questions she couldn’t answer. Lucy wasn’t sure herself what—if anything—she was going to do about the discovery she’d made at the New Yorker Hotel.

  “Luce?” said Cole. She’d almost forgotten he was there. Their gazes met as he tugged her toward him.

  Lucy took a step back. Much as she might want to fall into her boyfriend’s arms, he hadn’t apologized yet.

  “You can’t ghost me in person, Luce.” Cole shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “Ghost you?”

  He made a come on face. “I’ve been texting you all weekend.” He blew out a hard breath, mussing his bangs.

  Oh. “My phone broke,” she explained, a tad guiltily. Maybe she should have let him know.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She didn’t want to go into the details.

  After a beat Cole nodded, accepting her excuse, and a small, relieved smile formed on his lips.

  “My absentminded professor,” he said.

  Lucy squared her shoulders, dodging his attempt to steal a kiss. “Just because I wasn’t ghosting you doesn’t mean I’m not still mad.”

  His smile died, brow creasing, and he hung his head.

  “I mean, you could have come over if you couldn’t reach me online,” she said.

  “Luce, what do you think I’m doing now?”

  Touché. She shifted her weight.

  “You not talking to me has been tearing me up,” Cole continued, a raw quality to his voice. “I know I was a dumbass. I just wanted us to have an amazing prom. A night we won’t forget when we’re off at college.”

  “We don’t need money for that, Cole.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t think it through. Please, Luce. Tell me how to make this better.”

  His pleading look pierced her heart. It wasn’t made of stone, after all.

  “Okay,” Lucy acquiesced. She didn’t have the energy to stay angry. She wanted to rewind her life back to Friday night, before Schrödinger had knocked that stupid picture off her father’s desk.

  “Okay?” repeated Cole.

  “I’ll forgive you on two conditions.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted, brightening his face. “And those are?”

  “First, you can’t keep the money. You need to give it to charity or something. And second, you need to study for finals on your own.”

  His features crumpl
ed. “The second I can do. But I told you I already spent the money—I paid for a room at the White Hart Inn in Dorset. Clauds agreed to cover for us.”

  It was Lucy’s turn to sigh. He’d remembered. She loved that place. Her parents stayed there for their anniversary. Lucy didn’t normally get too excited about interior design, but each room had a fireplace and a wrought-iron canopy bed and it was all very romantic. Although if Claudia knew what Cole had done to pay for the room, she wouldn’t be down with it. At all. Lucy hated making her an accomplice.

  “What about the money Megan gave you on Friday?” she countered.

  He showed her a sly grin, reached into the back pocket of his jeans, and withdrew a mesh bag containing poker chips. Sunlight caught on the foil. Chocolate poker chips.

  Cole had been playing poker the first time they had a real conversation. More comfortable on the sidelines of any kind of socializing, Lucy had drifted to the edges of a party thrown by one of Claudia’s many friends and her interest became piqued by the poker game Cole was playing with some of the other jocks. To be completely honest, her interest had already been piqued by Cole but she’d concluded he was someone she’d only ever know from a distance. That one time she was glad to be wrong.

  Poker was a game Lucy understood. Mostly it had to do with probability and Lucy could calculate odds in her sleep. As she tracked the rounds of betting, it became clear Cole was bluffing. He had a losing hand. She’d thought she was being discreet in her observation, but Cole’s head snapped up when she laughed under her breath.

  Smiling wide, he’d challenged, “Hey, Opposites Attract Girl, think you can do better?”

  Lucy had amazed herself by saying, “I do.”

  And she did. She cleaned out half the football team. They called her a ringer and wouldn’t play with her again. Didn’t matter, though. Lucy had won her first date with Cole along with all their money.

  He watched the memory of that night pass through her eyes.

  “I love that you still call my bluff, Luce.”

  That did it. Lucy snatched the bag of candy and planted her lips on his. He tasted like Aquafresh and Cheerios and him. A normal high school boyfriend. This was what Lucy wanted—to be back on solid ground.

  A ground with totally normal polarities.

  As Cole deepened the kiss, however, encircling her with his arms, a peculiar feeling flooded Lucy. She swayed on her feet, nearly as nauseated as she’d been on the train back from the city. She clung more firmly to Cole’s neck, telling herself that she was imagining it and that she definitely wasn’t about to have another seizure. And yet her pulse continued to climb.

  Lucy panted short breaths against Cole’s mouth between kisses, not caring for once that the whole neighborhood had a front-row seat to their PDA. Desperation tightened her skin as she fought the queasy feeling overtaking her senses.

  It wasn’t possible to become allergic to kissing, was it?

  The sparks throbbing in her lips suggested maybe it was.

  “Wow. You’re supercharged,” Cole teased, rubbing his mouth. Yikes.

  First Claudia, now Cole. Lucy pushed him away before something worse could happen.

  “So I’m forgiven?” he said. Uncertainty lingered in his voice.

  “You must have bought an awful lot of chocolate with Megan’s money.”

  “Luce, I’ll buy you all the chocolate.” Beaming, Cole snatched Lucy’s book bag from the grass, shouldered it, and slid his other arm around her waist. “And I’ll drive you to school. Deal?”

  “Deal.” That seemed like a good idea. Lucy didn’t trust herself on Marie Curie right now. Then she remembered how late she was.

  “Crap! We’re gonna miss roll call.”

  Her boyfriend laughed. “I know. Look at you. Lucinda Phelps, walking on the wild side. PDA and late for class on the same day.”

  “You’re a bad influence.”

  He steered her toward his Jeep, still laughing. As he opened the door for Lucy, he took advantage of their proximity to wend his finger along her collarbone.

  “I missed you.” His breath tickled Lucy’s ear. “So much.”

  When she returned the sentiment with a kiss she felt sick to her stomach again.

  Lucy slipped into the shotgun seat, pressing a hand against her middle. Cole didn’t seem to notice her discomfort. He smiled at her as if all was right in the world, and she forced a matching smile right back.

  Lucy’s decision had been made for her. Ignoring what had happened in Tesla’s lab was no longer an option. She needed to get to the bottom of this. She wasn’t about to let her kissing privileges be revoked.

  Lucy would fix this. She had to.

  And she’d better do it fast.

  AC/DC

  White noise. Lucy basked in it. The library was almost as much of a sanctuary as the laboratory. A good researcher never relied on speculation; she needed evidence. Which was why Lucy had come here as soon as she’d apologized—for the twentieth time—to her first-period history teacher for being late.

  She needed answers. Facts.

  Although her gag reflex had calmed down on the ride to school, she seemed to have developed a new symptom.

  Cole let Lucy choose the radio station—he liked ’90s grunge, she was more Ella Fitzgerald—but when she touched the dial, the radio went berserk, blasting static. As if Lucy or the Tesla Egg—or both—were interfering with the radio.

  Except that didn’t make sense. It would take a big electromagnetic field to disrupt a radio, and human beings couldn’t produce anything on that scale.

  The welcome window for the library’s electronic-resources search engine flashed up on her computer screen.

  Nikola Tesla, she typed.

  Lucy could have Googled Tesla at home, but she knew better than to trust everything she found online. In her downtime, she often edited inaccuracies on Wikipedia. Plus, she didn’t want to leave a digital footprint. And yes, she knew that was paranoid. Not that, to her knowledge, her parents went through her browser history. Still, she’d rather be safe than sorry.

  5 matches.

  Lucy tapped a finger against the mouse, perusing the list. One title jumped out at her.

  AC/DC: The Current Wars.

  During her homeschooling, she’d learned that Thomas Edison invented DC—direct current—but that alternating current was gradually introduced because it was safer. Lucy’s father had never mentioned that Tesla was the one to invent AC, however, or that there had been a war. AC power was superior to DC because it could safely travel long distances, and it powered every home in America.

  If Tesla had won the war over electrical current, Lucy wondered, why wasn’t he as much of a household name as the inventor of the lightbulb?

  She scribbled down the call number for the book and bounded toward the stacks. When presented with the impossibly improbable, Lucy was determined to approach the problem the way her father had trained her. She would research and experiment, and discover a way to undo whatever had happened to her in the Tesla Suite so she could stop lying to her best friend and go back to kissing her boyfriend.

  Once she found the tome she was looking for, Lucy ensconced herself in an especially secluded corner of the library.

  Time lost all meaning as she devoured the life of Nikola Tesla.

  Before she could blink, the bell rang for next period. Feeling unsteady on her feet—which was getting old fast—Lucy closed the book and gathered her things, walking at a snail’s pace toward the checkout desk. She’d left the Tesla Egg in her locker for safekeeping, so Lucy knew this tilt-a-whirl feeling was all her.

  Disturbing fact number one: Tesla was born on the stroke of midnight during an electrical storm.

  So was Lucy.

  Born on two days, Lucy’s younger self used to demand two birthday cakes: one chocolate, the other red velvet. Never mind that she didn’t have enough guests at her birthday parties to finish one. It was a rare indulgent act on the part of her otherwise pragmatic
parents.

  Disturbing fact number two: Tesla was plagued by ill health and visions—flashes of light behind his eyes throughout his entire life. He believed these symptoms were prophetic, but they sounded like seizures to Lucy.

  On their own, neither fact was more than a random, bizarre parallel to Lucy’s life.

  But then there was disturbing fact number three.

  The Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company had paid the rent on Tesla’s New Yorker room from 1934 until his death. The same company that funded her father’s Ph.D. research and had just built a state-of-the-art physics lab at Gilbert College.

  That seemed a little too coincidental.

  Could her father’s doctoral work have been connected to Tesla’s experiments somehow? Would he know how to reverse whatever had happened to her? Asking for his help, of course, would require Lucy to admit what had happened. And that would very likely end her college career before it had begun.

  Not wanting to be late for another class, Lucy cleared her throat impatiently when she discovered the librarian’s desk empty.

  “Wait a sec—” came a muffled voice before a blond head popped up from behind the desk.

  “Oh. Hi, Lucy.” Megan Harper said her name like she’d just swallowed a bug.

  The other girl was gorgeous: long, perfectly tousled hair and legs that went on for days, making her the star hurdler of the track team. Thinking of Megan in her uniform sidling next to Cole at practice, it had never frustrated Lucy more that she couldn’t play on a team because of her condition. The fact that he’d sold Lucy’s test answers to Megan of all people only made it worse.

  “I need to check this out,” she said, handing over the book.

  The other girl wriggled her nose as she glanced at the title with the natural disdain of those who’d always belonged to the in-crowd.

  “Extra-credit project?”

  “No.” Lucy shrugged, cheeks heating. “Just fun.”

  “We all have to make our own, I suppose.” Megan brandished a sugary-bitchy smile. “Student ID.”