Son of Tesla

SON OF TESLA: Chapter 36

DEEP INSIDE THE HOLLOW caverns of sleep, Petar heard something snap. His eyes shot open; his arm zipped in front of his face in a reflexive gesture.

There was nothing there. The hotel room was utterly silent. Jem! His head twisted to the left. The boy was still there, a silent, lumpy shape on the neighboring bed. Petar could see his face outlined above the comforter in the dim glow of an orange halogen lamp somewhere beyond the curtain.

Petar sat up and scanned the room. Chiaroscuro shadows played tricks with his sleep-deprived brain, but eventually he satisfied himself that there was nobody in the room with them.

He'd been dreaming of Volos, his childhood. The pink bula tree where he'd spent so many endless days while his father worked in his lab. "Burning trees," the natives called them. Dark, greenish brown trunk thicker than ten of him tied in a bundle, so thick he could wrap his eleven-year-old arms around it and feel as if they were stretching around the whole world, thick, warm, knotty bark scraping softly against his skin.

Even on Volos, bula trees were rare. This particular one was the last of what he'd heard had once been a giant forest, thick as the Belt itself for hundreds of miles. It grew in the middle of a field of blood-red shah grass, with two narrow dirt ruts leading up to it where someone – his father, he supposed – had once cut through the field in an electric runner. Why he would do that, Petar didn't know. His father wasn't one for displays of sentimentality, and bula trees had nothing to offer him in his line of work. Yet there they were, silent guides through the razor-tipped shah that sliced and grabbed at passing flesh.

So Petar had found refuge in the one spot on Volos that it seemed his father had no interest in destroying. Bula trunks grew hot at the core, but were so thick that the outer bark only had a fraction of that heat, like a warm body. Their leaves grew with a dazzling Persian rose hue, and when they died, they flared in a brief yet equally dazzling pink flame and dropped to the ground as a fragile sheet of ash.

In his dream, Petar had been sitting in the bula, straddling one of the wide lower limbs and playing with how long he could hold a little bula twig, passing the scorching shoot between his hands like a child playing hot potato. The limbs here in the lower foliage were hotter than the trunk, but not yet uncomfortable. Higher up, where the limbs were smaller, the heat levels rose to a blistering sear. And the leaves themselves shimmered like the air above a campfire or on a blacktop in the summer heat.

When the red rains came, bula trees hissed and spat and came alive. Steam issued from their leaves in great, rolling clouds that lit up with intermittent flashes each time another leaf burst toward its glorious death.

The twig in Petar's hand rested in one small palm for a second too long, and he gave a yelp and dropped it. It seemed to float toward the ground, barely heavier than the air around it, dancing and twirling in a downward spiral until it gently came to rest on the orange earth, and snap!

It was from here that Petar burst from sleep to find himself in the dark hotel room. After checking the room, he let his head fall to the pillow once more just as a hand shot from the darkness beside him and clamped over his mouth.

His eyes flew open. With his right hand, he grabbed at the one covering his mouth. With his left, he struck out into the dark space beside the bed. His fist connected with something that made a loud oomph sound. Something hard collapsed under his knuckes with a complicated crunch. It felt like a nose.

Petar ripped the now-weak hand off his face and lept to his feet on the other side of the bed. Bad placement – the assailant was in the narrow space between the beds, and now he was between Petar and Jem. But before Petar could run around, two massive arms wrapped around him from behind. He kicked, lifting both feet into the air, but the iron grip held.