Son of Tesla

SON OF TESLA: Chapter 46

PETAR SLID AROUND a waist-high spool of gleaming copper wire and plunged down a narrow makeshift alleyway. Jem staggered behind him. Dim white shapes and metallic objects blurred past. He skidded to a stop, his boots scraping across the concrete floor. Directly ahead, a wide stack of iron rebar cut through the path. Dead end. Just beyond the pile of rebar rose the lab's gray wall, blank and impassive. So close.

Jem was breathing hard. Petar stopped and grabbed his shoulders, looked into his eyes. The sounds of battle continued to rage unseen from the vucari and Samil's men. Petar ignored it.

"How you doin', buddy? See anything yet?"

"Just...shapes. Outlines. It's coming back. Slowly." Jem's voice was small and frightened. His cream-covered eyes whipped back and forth, looking but not seeing. Petar realized again how much he was pushing the boy. Jem hadn't grown up expecting something like this to happen to him. Petar forgot, sometimes. He'd spent months preparing for this. This was his mission. It wasn't fair to the boy. If he could take back the last two days, he would in a heartbeat. He'd forget all about Jem. Go to Colorado on his own. Find his own way back to Volos.

Who was he to alter the life of another? Nobody. He knew what he had to do now.

"You're doing good," Petar said reassuringly, giving Jem's shoulder a squeeze. "We're almost done."

"Let's do it then." Jem's slim hand reached out and gripped Petar's. His face lit up. "I saw," he said, smiling..

The thickening of the air was almost imperceptible, but Petar knew what it was the second he felt it.

"Get down!" he shouted, throwing himself into Jem. Too slow. A vibrant sizzle split the air and Jem's side burst into a stream of scarlet. Petar collapsed on top of him, his face wet with Jem's blood. Jem cried out and clutched his side. Petar rolled, fingers working. A bolt of lightning shot from his palm, then another, and a third. They blasted down the winding corridor. The first charred a chrome pipe jutting off the side of a cooling machine. The second hit a cloth drop cover, knocking over whatever was below it and setting the fabric alight.

The third sizzled into a shimmering block of air a dozen feet away, spreading across the shape until the shimmer took on a humanoid form.

Petar's back hit the concrete floor and he fired off two more shots through his raised knees. Both hit. Sparks erupted from empty air, and a Koschei bent into view, the air seemingly sliding back around him.

The Koschei stumbled, raised its fermion rifle. Rrap. Petar rolled. Concrete shards bit into his back. He came up on his side against a lumpy, sheet-covered wall and fired another bolt. The Koschei whirled, its cloak twisting into a cyclone around it. Petar's shot bit harmlessly into black fabric.

Rrap. Rrap. Two fermion bolts flew from the black maelstrom, the Koschei still spinning. One hit the sheet behind Petar with a crackle of ozone and burning polyester. The second burst into his forearm. Sparks flew from the polytransmitter. Petar screamed as the flesh melted away over it.

A flap of the fabric fluttered against Petar's cheek and he grabbed at it, tugged. It caught on something, then came loose, and with it a wall crashed down over Petar.

Boxes of dynamos. Couplings. Iron bolts. They tumbled and split open and sprayed their contents across the corridor. A case of neon bulbs hit the ground and exploded in a spray of thin glass shards. A decade's worth of Nikola Tesla's smaller devices – telegraphy parts, radio transmitters, disk-like bifilar coils, vaccuum tubes – skittered and danced across the smooth surface of the lab floor.

Petar covered his face and felt iron and copper and glass bounce off his arms, off his head, off his face. It was a mountain breaking into shards. Some of it new, modern additions to the lab; much of it a century old, touched and worked by his father's hands.