Heat radiated from the device. He wouldn’t be able to touch it with his bare hands to turn it off. He took the handkerchief from his suit pocket and reached for the device. The dial was stuck, and the handkerchief started to smoke.
He gritted his teeth, trying to shut out the pain in his head and his hands, the noise of the alarms, the creaking of the steel, and his rising dread. The platform they were standing on quivered like a cat about to pounce.
He’d never be able to turn the dial. Instead, he focused his attention on unscrewing the clamps. His sweaty hands slipped off the clamps again and again. The device shifted, and he yanked it off. It burned through his handkerchief. He’d have a scar to match his father’s.
He dropped the device into his coat pocket. It probably had evidence on it, but he wasn’t going to give it to the police. That wasn’t what his father would have wanted.
“Back!” he called, and Vivian pulled him back.
The shaking had already slowed. Barely perceptible, but it was a good sign.
“Steps down are clear, sir.”
He looked down the broken staircase. If she’d dropped him, he’d have died.
Edison took Joe’s sleeve in his mouth and gently tugged. “Right you are, boy. Time to go.”
Someone had shut off the alarm. Joe’s ears rang in the silence.
He dropped his hand to the top of the dog’s head. “We’ve got a long walk home.”
The device cooled as they hurried down the broken stairs. The pigeon followed, circling above their heads.
He opened the door at the next level, and a rush of warm air streamed in. Either an open window or a broken one. Either one would do.
As if it understood what he was thinking, the pigeon flew straight through the open door and out into the building like it had a plan.
Joe wished that he did, too.
Chapter 49
Vivian dragged Tesla through the tunnels. He was white and trembling, but he still kept his legs moving. He’d thrown up once inside the building, and she was worried that he’d reinjured his head. She had to get him back to Dr. Stauss.
“Need break,” he said.
She looked back. They’d put some distance between themselves and the Empire State Building. She lowered him to the ground.
He leaned against the stone wall and closed his eyes.
There had to be surveillance cameras in the Empire State Building. It was only a matter of time before someone traced them here. But he couldn’t walk any farther, and he wasn’t going to let her carry him.
She sat next to him, wishing she’d thought to bring a water bottle. The dog was crowded up against his leg, resting his head on Tesla’s lap. It looked worried, too.
“How you doing, sir?” she asked.
He opened his eyes and gave her a weak grin. “Thanks for not letting go back there.”
“That’s my job,” she said. “Rule one: Never let your client fall eighty-five stories. Bad for business.”
“You have a good grip.”
“I climb,” she said. “Good for hand strength.”
He smiled. He looked a little better now. The rest had done him good.
He took the metal device out of his pocket and set it on the ground. “My father wanted me to destroy this.”
“Yes, sir.” They’d seen what it could do in the wrong hands.
“It could be a force for good.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself of something. “Or evil.”
“Any weapon is only as evil as the one wielding it.”
“If we let this out of our hands, anyone could be the one wielding it.”
“That’s what ‘out of our hands’ means.”
Tesla shut his eyes so long she wondered if he’d gone to sleep. Vivian waited. Destroying the device was Tesla’s choice to make. Even if she did it, for all she knew he could build another one. She glanced back the way they had come. If they got caught here, it would be confiscated, and then there wouldn’t be any decision to make.
Tesla sat back up. He picked up the device and fiddled with it. He used one of his old keys like a screwdriver and took the back off. A few minutes later, he had a pile of metal pieces in his lap.
He raised his arm and tossed a handful down the tunnel. Edison looked out at them as if deciding whether to fetch them back.
Tesla struggled to his feet, and she squelched her instinct to help him. He looked weak, but determined.
He handed her some gears. They were still warm. Back in the building the device had been practically red-hot. She flung them ahead of her. A few pinged off the metal subway tracks.
Together, they walked toward his house, scattering Nikola Tesla’s invention around them as they went.
Chapter 50
Joe set Tik-Tok son the tiny nightstand. The nightstand was jammed between two beds with floral bedspreads. Room 3327, the room where Nikola Tesla died, was smaller and shabbier than he had expected. Edison sat next to the door.
“I bet it didn’t look like that when your creator lived here,” Joe told Tik-Tok. “Back then I heard that it was over twice as big — two rooms combined into a suite.”
Still, it was small, especially considering that he had lived there for ten years and had packed the rooms with pigeon cages and drawings and gadgets. Joe sat on the bed and leaned against the arched headboard. The New Yorker Hotel had been more luxurious in Nikola’s time, more like the Grand Central Hyatt, where Joe himself might have had to while away his days, trapped in a hotel suite not much bigger than his non-ancestor’s.
But he had escaped into the tunnels back to the Gallos’ house. That was a lot to be thankful for. And his mother had scrubbed his house spotless. She’d even sent all the rugs and curtains off for dry cleaning, so the entire house was shades lighter.
Joe looked at the small window. Per his request, the curtains had been drawn closed before he arrived. He hoped that once it got dark outside, he could open them again.
He took a picture of his father out of his bag and set it next to the automaton. The photo was taken when he graduated from college, before he met Tatiana, but she’d somehow acquired it and passed it on to Joe. His father’s gown billowed in front of him, and he sported a narrow 1950s-era tie and thick-framed black glasses. He looked young and happy.
Joe wished he’d met him before his father had clamped the Oscillator to the bridge. The deaths he had caused had hung heavy on him for Joe’s entire life, but the picture showed that he had been carefree once.
Joe touched the top of the picture frame and then Tik-Tok’s round head. He and the automaton had fulfilled his father’s final wish. He’d had the courage to destroy the device, the courage that his father had lacked. But he wasn’t proud of himself — he’d destroyed something that had been capable of great destruction, yes, but it had also been capable of great good. The device had been neutral, but the people who’d used it were not.
Joe wasn’t about to let them go. His attempts to link the attack to Spooky, or to find out the identity of Ash, hadn’t been helped much by the contents of Egger’s laptop, but he wasn’t giving up. It would take time, but he intended to reconstruct the actions of Spooky and find out Ash’s identity.
He’d assembled a database of all of Ash’s communications and was running linguistic analyses against it to find out the patterns in those texts and emails. Given enough time, he was certain that he could identify Ash and track him down. Ash wasn’t someone who could stay out of the spotlight, and somewhere, either in the past or the future, his style of writing would lead Joe right to him. Then he could turn him in for the murders of Quantum and Geezer (Michael Pham and Professor Egger).