The Tesla Legacy Page 8

  Lucy didn’t plan on using the stove.

  She set the pan on the countertop, then carefully removed her Medic Alert bracelet and shoved it in her pocket. She didn’t want anything interfering with the parameters of the experiment.

  Her fingers twitched as she placed her right hand flush against the cold, smooth aluminum.

  The test was simple. Empirical.

  The incidents with the bracelet, the stapler, and the iPad all seemed to suggest that Lucy was creating large electric and magnetic fields, and that they were somehow tied to her emotions. In physics, one of the most fundamental laws was that energy couldn’t be created or destroyed. Almost two hundred years ago, Michael Faraday—the same guy who designed the cage in Tesla’s lab—had discovered that changing a magnetic field induces electric current.

  Therefore, if Lucy really was generating her own magnetic fields, and if she could control them, she should be able to induce electricity in any handy piece of metal: such as the popcorn pan. By running this current through aluminum, which, like all metals, had a natural resistance, it should produce the heat required to pop the kernels.

  It was a totally straightforward, totally illogical experiment.

  Lucy closed her eyes and drew in a steadying breath. The aluminum crinkled beneath her fingertips.

  Concentrate.

  When she’d toasted the iPad, she’d been alarmed. Panicked. And when Megan had taunted Lucy about Cole, she’d been afraid the Mean Girl was right. Lucy needed an adrenaline jolt and because she was clearly a masochist, she focused on re-creating those conditions.

  One by one, she scrolled through her catalogue of fears. She conjured the memory of standing alone on the playground, the other kids laughing and pointing at her helmet. Her body tensed with the phantom throbbing in her temples that preceded a seizure.

  Not enough.

  She pictured the blanket of blackness that covered her mind when a seizure gripped her. That paralyzing moment before her conscious mind gave up the fight while she knew what was coming. The inevitable surrender.

  Still not enough. Maybe surrender had become too familiar.

  Dig deeper.

  Lucy forced herself to relive the fear that had plagued her for months after she started dating Cole: the potential humiliation of succumbing to a seizure while having sex for the first time. He hadn’t pushed the issue; Lucy had been the one to suggest it. Their one-year anniversary and Lucy’s eighteenth birthday had been fast approaching and she’d told Cole he could do better than an Amazon gift card.

  The Coke he’d been drinking nearly spurted through his nostrils.

  I love you, Lucy Phelps, he’d said.

  Nevertheless, the thought of messing up their first time together had terrorized her. She was too embarrassed to talk to Dr. Rosen about sex, but she reasoned if she couldn’t play sports because of her heart rate, then sex might also be a trigger. Nor did Lucy want to tell her parents she and Cole were taking things to the next level. Yes, they were East Coast liberals but even they had their limits.

  Lucy screwed her eyelids tighter, pulse accelerating, and thrust herself further into the memory.

  Shortly after Cole’s declaration, they’d picked a night to be “The Night.” He often had the house to himself because Mr. Hewitt was a software sales rep and Cole’s mom traveled with him to wine and dine clients. Claudia had been in on the plan, of course, providing the cover of a sleepover for Lucy’s parents. Lucy would’ve disabled the GPS tracker on her phone that night, but it didn’t matter because her phone conked out hours before the big event.

  Standing in the kitchen, perspiration began to dot Lucy’s hairline. She recalled sweating all through the romantic dinner Cole had made as well. He burned the steaks but it was the thought that counted. There were candles and a bouquet of pink carnations on the table. He watched her avidly, sensing something was off as Lucy had grown quieter and quieter.

  By the time Cole served up a Sara Lee chocolate cake, he dragged his chair next to hers, resting his hand on top of hers and saying, “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.” His tone was relaxed and Lucy knew he really would be okay to wait, but she confessed, “It’s not that.”

  What had really scared Lucy was the possibility that if she told Cole she might seize during sex, he wouldn’t want to touch her. Ever again. But in that moment she decided if she trusted him enough to sleep with him, she had to trust him with the truth.

  His response couldn’t have been more perfect. He tucked a hair behind her ear, and looked her directly in the eye. “I want to be with you,” he said. “All of you. I’m not scared.” The words convinced Lucy that what she’d been feeling for Cole really was love. It was why she’d forgiven him for selling the test answers.

  So why couldn’t she trust him with the truth about this?

  A faint crackling noise filled the kitchen. It grew louder by the second and her heartbeat skittered.

  Lucy didn’t want to tell Cole the truth because now she really might be something he should be scared of—something that scared her too.

  Warmth spread from her hand to her elbow as the aluminum wrapping began to unfurl.

  It was working. Holy crap. It was working!

  Dread iced her from within as heat surged from her fingers. She didn’t want to open her eyes but there was no avoiding it.

  Ouch! Hot. Lucy lifted her hand so it hovered just above the Jiffy Pop. Apparently her skin wasn’t fireproof. Inconvenient.

  The aluminum swelled, larger and rounder, until it became a balloon.

  Lucy’s hand was glowing. But not with sunlight like this morning. An emerald-green aura comprised of thin, radiant streaks of light. Jellyfish-like tentacles. She had a distinct sense of déjà vu.

  The aura continued to burn more intensely but the temperature in Lucy’s hand remained constant. As long as she didn’t touch the metal, it didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt good. The zap that killed the iPad had been a short burst of energy, a shock. This was different. The slow burn was making her giddy.

  The bag stretched to bursting.

  All the fear at what she was capable of vaporized and Lucy laughed.

  Popcorn suddenly sprayed everywhere and the bang made Lucy lurch, jolting backwards, bashing her skull against the cabinet. Double ouch. There was only so much head trauma she could take in one day.

  Her gaze returned to her hands. The green glow was gone.

  If she wasn’t mistaken, the glow had been St. Elmo’s fire—a greenish-bluish light that appeared around the masts of ships before a storm due to the electricity in the air. During the age of Columbus, sailors viewed it as a bad omen because it could disrupt compass readings. Her mouth fell open.

  Lucy had interfered with Cole’s car radio in the same way.

  St. Elmo’s fire was an incandescent plasma, like in the Tesla lamp, caused by an electrical discharge adjacent to a metal conductor. The aluminum foil had probably done the trick. Oh no. What if Lucy had made the stapler glow in the library this morning? What rumor would Megan have started then? Lucy had never believed in the paranormal, but … how else could she explain what had just happened?

  The only person who might have an explanation had been dead since 1943.

  In. Out. Just breathe, she commanded herself.

  The strains of Beethoven ceased and Lucy heard footsteps on the stairs.

  There was no explaining this away. The kitchen looked like a junk-food war zone.

  A second later, her mom appeared in the entryway.

  “Oh, Lucy.” Her name became a lament. More than annoyance, there was sympathy in her mother’s eyes.

  “Sorry,” Lucy choked out.

  Her mom sighed. “You and your father.”

  “I’ll clean it up.”

  Nodding, her mother shuffled back toward the living room and Lucy noticed her withdraw a pack of cigarettes from her sweater pocket.

  Acid churned in Lucy’s gut as she gauged the damage. Popcorn she co
uld clean up. Her life? Not so much.

  DARK STAR

  Lucy’s last few days had gone something like this: she slipped off her Medic Alert bracelet as soon as she was out of her mom’s view in the morning, stopped wearing earrings altogether, and gave cutlery the fisheye, afraid it would pull a Fantasia on her.

  She’d also added another fib to her expanding repertoire, telling Claudia that Marie Curie had a punctured tire. She hated lying but she couldn’t risk the ten-speed developing a mind of its own in the middle of traffic. Her best friend didn’t mind shuttling Lucy back and forth in the Mystery Minivan because it provided her with ample opportunity to relay the details of her nightly text exchanges with Jess.

  As Lucy had suspected, Jess was a sophomore at Heron, double-majoring in art history and psychology. Her family was Irish like Claudia’s; she had an unhealthy obsession with Sriracha sauce (she even put it on her cereal); and dabbled in BASE jumping. Lucy wondered how anyone could “dabble” in BASE jumping without becoming roadkill, but she kept mum because she’d never seen Claudia so gaga.

  When the final bell rang on Friday, relief, nerves, and excitement warred inside her. Approaching the office at the back of the physics classroom, Lucy’s right thumb twitched instinctively against the inside of her opposite wrist, searching out the charms that usually dangled there. She couldn’t believe how naked her skin felt without the bracelet she’d once loathed. The clinking sound as she flicked the silver charms together was always soothing, and soothing was what she needed now.

  She blinked away the image of Cole’s bewildered face as she turned down the offer of being his cheerleader at track practice today. Most of the time, Lucy was more than happy to cheer him on from the sidelines, but this afternoon what she needed more than her boyfriend was physics. Science. Laws that made sense.

  Lucy took a deep breath, straightened up, and rapped twice on the office door. Mrs. Brandon had given Lucy her own key, free to come and go as she pleased, but she didn’t want to be presumptuous with Ravi.

  She knocked again with a little more force.

  Mass times acceleration. Lucy rolled her eyes. What a nerd. And yet there was something reassuring about reciting formulas. They were constant. They always worked correctly. Unlike her. Even pre–Tesla Suite. And now—now her life was anything but formulaic.

  Her hand hovered mid-knock as the door shuddered open.

  Ravi’s face was creased beneath his glasses, demeanor harried. He pulled out his earbuds, draping them on either side of his neck.

  “Lucy,” he said. His eyes brightened and his soft inflection made her go soft in the head. Fiddling with the wires, he added, “Didn’t hear you.”

  Looking anywhere but his eyes, Lucy spotted an origami unicorn prancing in the rain across his black T-shirt. She owned the exact same one.

  “Do you dream of electric sheep?” she said, grinning in spite of her erratic pulse.

  He returned it. “Blade Runner is a classic.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that. Since Americans have less culture than yah-gurt.” She dared to lift her gaze and he chuckled. “But here’s a really high-stakes question for you: book or movie?”

  “Those are high stakes.”

  “The best kind.” Lucy double-checked her hands weren’t glowing with emerald fire. Phew. The sudden sass was entirely homegrown.

  Ravi tapped his chin as he considered. “Generally, because I’m a purist as well as a pedant, I would have to go with Philip K. Dick’s short story.”

  “I know it’s a short story.”

  “I didn’t doubt it.” He laughed again. “On the other hand, the movie does have Rutger Hauer. No one does menacing quite like him.”

  “Fair point,” she conceded.

  Turning the tables, Ravi said, “I have a high-stakes question for you.” He folded his arms, exposing the leather patches on the elbows of his jacket. “Which is more authentic, human or Replicant?”

  “That is a high-stakes question.”

  “The best kind.”

  Their eyes met and her mind went blank. Lucy and Cole never bantered like this. That’s right: Cole. Your boyfriend!

  Forcing herself to focus on the question at hand, Lucy smooshed her lips together and mulled over her response. The classroom became intensely quiet. In both the movie and the short story, Replicants were androids nearly indistinguishable from humans except they couldn’t experience true human emotions or dreams that weren’t preprogrammed. At least, that’s what the humans thought.

  She hugged herself as a wintry blast rushed through her. Did Lucy’s post–Tesla Suite symptoms make her less than human? There was no way she was some kind of sophisticated android—right?

  Ravi tilted his head, still waiting for an answer.

  “Hmm,” she began eloquently. “I guess that depends on your definition of authentic.”

  “Agreed. How would you define it?”

  “Being true to yourself.”

  “I like that,” he told her, and slouched against the doorjamb. “So, which is it? Who’s more true to themselves: humans or Replicants?”

  Lucy just barely resisted swaying towards him. Mirroring his body language, she folded her arms and replied, “Replicants. Because they try harder to know themselves.”

  “Nice.” A broad smile swept across his face, which shouldn’t have made Lucy as giddy as it did. “Do I spy a budding philosophy major?”

  “Hardly. Science all the way.”

  “You have a talent for it. Speaking of which, time to get down to business.” His face smoothed into something more serious. “Do you want to talk me through your experiment?”

  Hands clammy, she mumbled, “Sure,” and followed him inside.

  That’s the reason Lucy was here, after all. The only reason: Science and nothing but science.

  Once the components of the experiment were arranged carefully on the black countertop at the front of the classroom, Ravi asked Lucy to describe her objectives.

  “Right. So.” She chewed the inside of her cheek. “The experiment I devised was to re-create the first battery invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800, and then to use the battery to power an iPod.” It had actually been her dad’s talks about alternative power that inspired Lucy’s project.

  As Ravi’s eyes drifted to the tabletop and back to her, Lucy dug her fingernails into her palms. The experiment must have seemed incredibly elementary.

  “I’m also writing a paper,” she told him. “Explaining the significance of Volta’s invention in the history of science. He lent his name to the volt, after all. But of course you know—”

  Ravi cut her off. “Talk me through it.”

  The earnest quality of his voice quelled her doubts. The laboratory was Lucy’s domain. Here—if nowhere else—she knew what she was doing. She inhaled through her nose, her restlessness draining away.

  You’ve got this.

  Lucy pointed at the alternating zinc, copper, and cardboard discs stacked on top of one another like some kind of electrical s’mores.

  “Volta was a student of Luigi Galvani. Galvani theorized that animals create their own electricity. He conducted an experiment in which a dead frog’s legs were connected to two different pieces of metal. When the legs twitched, Galvani concluded the electricity came from the frog. But Volta deduced it was the touching of the metals—brass and iron—that caused the frog’s legs to twitch, rather than the frog itself.”

  Leaning toward her, Ravi asked, “Was Galvani completely wrong about animal electricity?”

  “Of course.” Lucy’s pulse thudded in her throat.

  “Think about how a thumbprint is used to unlock a smartphone,” he pressed her. Ravi had no idea how close to an uncomfortable truth he was getting. “It’s not just the fingerprint. It’s the body’s conductivity to electricity that allows it to be read.”

  “The nervous system, you mean.”

  “Precisely.” His half-smile made him look almost boyish and it delighted
Lucy, yet she couldn’t shake a sinking feeling.

  “It’s not the same, though.” Her words were labored. “Our nerves send electrical impulses around the body but they can’t power anything.”

  Liar. Liar. Liar.

  Lucy’s lower lip quivered because she wanted it to be true, and she was immensely grateful when Ravi said, “All right. Back to the Voltaic pile. How does it work?”

  Fighting her unease, Lucy replied, “The battery has a negative charge at one end and a positive charge at the other.” She cleared her throat, and her voice grew stronger. “Volta discovered that a single juncture between two metals doesn’t produce much electricity. When he multiplied the junctures and joined them with saltwater-soaked cardboard, however, he could generate enough electricity for a mild shock.”

  “What does the saltwater do?”

  “The saltwater allows for the flow of electricity without the metals touching each other.”

  Ravi murmured a noise of assent. “And how do you determine how much voltage is required to power the iPod?” he said, his question laced with encouragement.

  “Well, Volta used himself as the conductor—adding more discs to his pile and letting his body receive increasingly large shocks.” Lucy laughed. “Lucky for me, I have a voltage meter.”

  Ravi laughed along. “Yeah. Let’s not do it Volta’s way. Otherwise I’ll have the shortest teaching career in history.”

  “So, you’re eager to mold young minds, then?” Lucy’s mouth ticked up. “Physics is your major, I’m guessing.”

  “Actually, it’s maths. Or math, as you Yanks say. Really. It’s mathematics plural. I don’t get it.” He offered her a smirk. “Barbarians.”

  Lucy snorted as her belly flipped. Stop that.