Run (The Tesla Effect #2) Read Online Free Page A

conversations, but whatever arguments her mom’s old college roommate—and career spy, as it turned out—had used, they had done the trick.
    “Tell him yourself,” said Max, no longer interested.
    What’s Dad’s problem now ? Tesla wondered after she’d showered and slipped on well-worn boyfriend jeans and her new favorite T-shirt from an eighties Rolling Stones concert tour. She and her father had enjoyed a much-improved relationship for a total of three days after he’d been rescued from Sebastian Nilsen, a bat-shit crazy physicist who hated Greg Abbott and was willing to do anything to get his hands on her parents’ experimental work with time travel. But it hadn’t lasted. Somehow, things at home had settled right back into their familiar pattern.
    Those three days had been wonderful, though—Tesla and Max and their dad, holed up in the house, sometimes with Aunt Jane, had talked, laughed and even cried on occasion as they reveled in a togetherness they had never before experienced. All because they had nearly lost one of their own—again.
    Why can’t we get along when we’re not in catastrophe mode ? Tesla thought.
    For that brief, happy time last summer they had all felt a shell-shocked kind of gratitude, and an unfamiliar need to talk, to explain to each other all that had happened, again and again. Greg Abbott’s kidnapping, the insane fact that Tesla could travel back in time through her parents’ time machine because of her unique, arrhythmic heartbeat, which her mother had used to calibrate the machine just before she’d died. It had been amazing, everyone talking, and listening—it seemed they would never tire of it. At the end of those first few days, however, the communication, the closeness, it just—stopped.
    There was nothing left to say.
    It wasn’t until much, much later that Tesla realized they had discussed the time travel machine, and what had happened with Tesla when she made the jumps, how she and Max had felt, how they’d coped, the ways in which Aunt Jane and the others had been so vitally important—even Lydia, the agent they’d trusted and who in the end had betrayed them all. But they had never—not once—discussed Nilsen in any meaningful way, nor did Tesla ever ask her father about Nilsen’s unthinkable accusation that there had been no car accident and it was Greg Abbott himself who was responsible for his wife’s death eight years earlier.
    Dr. Abbott had gone back to work—his own work, as well as his duties as the new Director of the Institute for Experimental Physics—and Max got serious about his summer reading list. Tesla accepted Aunt Jane’s offer of an after-school job as an official member of the team, and spent the rest of the summer in a kind of secret-agent orientation—as had Bizzy, Joley, and Finn—even Beckett. Jane Doane ran a much tighter ship than Lydia ever had, and that meant they had to read field manuals, memorize protocols, and begin serious physical training. At this point, a couple of months in, they all worked as hard as Beckett did—or at least as often. They weren’t on assignment at the moment (Joley said it was the off-season in espionage, when spies went on holiday). Every afternoon after school they fenced or kick boxed, did CrossFit routines or lifted weights, did resistance or speed training, and it was beginning to pay off in specific skill improvements, but especially in general fitness. Even as a runner and a sometimes-basketball player, Tesla had never been in such good shape.
    Weaponry was one of their key skill sets, of course. They all went to the gun range Lydia had constructed within half the basement of the giant old house, where they disassembled, reassembled, and loaded various firearms to see who was faster. When they moved to actual target practice, Tesla was excused—she still couldn’t bring herself to fire a gun, and she had no idea why. She had discussed it with Beckett once, had asked the deadly blonde why