Being burned alive was not how Lucy had planned to end her evening.
Luckily, the fireplace was a fake. As Rick crawled through the firebox on his belly, Lucy wiped her dirty palms against her leggings. She had to hand it to the Sophists. The illusion was complete, right down to the chopped wood resting by the hearth. No one would ever suspect that a trapdoor to a secret network of tunnels lay beneath the chimney.
Lucy twirled on the spot, observing her surroundings by the forest-green glow radiating from the Tesla Egg. She wasn’t sure how far they’d walked underground, perhaps only a block or two, but it appeared as if they’d stumbled through a wormhole into the early 1800s. And they were standing in someone’s living room: a pair of claw-footed armchairs were positioned on either side of the fireplace; in the far corner of the room was a Jane Austen–era pianoforte. Oil paintings of battles and portraits of women with Marie Antoinette powdered wigs were staggered along oak-paneled walls.
Her eyes completed their circuit and settled on the mosaic inlaid across the mantel. Rose-colored tiles were once more arranged in six blossoms containing six petals each. At the midpoint of the mantel, three flowers on either side, lay a beetle.
Crackling filled her ears. The com device. Something must be jamming it. She shook her head like a wet dog and the static dissipated.
“The scarab,” Lucy said, taken aback, praying that if Ravi could hear her he might recognize her location.
Rick traced his finger along the tiles. The Freelancer might have abandoned the Order of Sophia, but he admired the insect with the same expression Ravi wore when he talked about the Ouroboros. What was it her mom had told Lucy about the scarab? The Egyptian alchemists believed it to be a sacred animal, possessing the power of creation and transmutation. But surely the Sophists knew that wasn’t true?
Not looking at her, Rick said, “There are those who’ve never believed the philosopher’s stone was a what—but a who.”
This was not the moment for philosophizing. “Where are we?” Lucy demanded.
Please be hearing this, Ravi.
“A merchant’s house. Once a big player in the opium trade,” Rick answered, unhelpfully enigmatic.
“The Sophists were nineteenth-century drug dealers?”
“Narcotics can be medicinal.” He lifted an eyebrow. “His descendants run a pharmaceutical company. And this home is now open to the public as a museum.”
A museum? They’d broken into a freaking museum! The police were probably already on their way.
“Are you kidding me? There must be a million cameras in here.” She pitted her cheeks. “Shouldn’t we at least be wearing masks?”
“Not a million cameras. Only the one.”
Rick pointed at a grandfather clock on the opposite side of the room.
“Take care of that for me.” He waved at it with a grin. “You Americans say cheese, correct?”
Anger flared inside Lucy and the radius of the St. Elmo’s fire grew. Rick wasn’t concerned about starring in America’s Most Criminal Home Videos. Meanwhile, Lucy could forget about college.
“Whatever you think I can do, you’re wrong,” she said, an edge to her voice.
Rick lunged for her and allowed the emerald flame to singe his jacket. She yanked her hand back instinctually, then cursed herself for not holding her ground.
“What I know you can do is send an electromagnetic pulse that disables the camera’s circuitry. By the time anyone realizes the feed has gone dark, we should be gone.”
“You’re delusional.”
Rick smiled at her, a hard smile, but the look in his eyes was strangely misty.
“I knew someone else like you. Long ago. You remind me of her.”
Lucy rocked onto the balls of her feet. “Who? What happened to her?”
“That is also not a story for tonight.” Any glimmer of tenderness vanished from his face. “Meet me upstairs in two minutes. We need to clear out before the guards do their next sweep.”
“What if we don’t?”
“That’s what Meifen is for.”
In three imperious strides, Rick had left Lucy to her own devices. She had no time to lose.
She eyed the grandfather clock. Weathered cherry wood, a swaying brass gong like a lolling tongue. It didn’t look like a worthy adversary, but looks could be deceiving.
“Okay, Luce. You’re back in your lab,” she said aloud. “You need to create an electromagnetic pulse. What do you do?”
If Ravi knew the answer, he wasn’t forthcoming. All she was getting was spitting white noise.
Of course!
Lucy was the source of the static. Her heightened emotional state must be jamming the frequency. She should have realized sooner. But she did have a pretty good reason for being stressed out of her mind.
She held the Tesla Egg in one hand and rubbed the tourmaline around her neck with the other. The stone stabilized her oscillations, but what Lucy needed was to be the opposite of stable. She glared at the egg. Theoretically she could amplify her electromagnetic field so that anything else using her frequency would couple with her and burn itself out.
Theoretically.
The question was how to focus the direction of the electromagnetic burst. She didn’t want to fry everything in her immediate vicinity. Especially not her com device, the only link she had to Ravi.
Urgently, with shaky fingers, Lucy unfastened the necklace Claudia had lovingly crafted and laid it on the mantelpiece.
She hurried toward the clock and held out her hand. In the center of the gear that suspended the second and minute hands together she noticed a blinking red light. If the Order of Sophia didn’t know about her before, they did now.
Lucy gripped the Tesla Egg and watched the emerald fire intensify, brighter and brighter. Like when she was back in her garage lab, she imagined the most distressing thing she could.
She pictured Claudia, blood leaking from her mouth, her throat split from ear to ear in a gruesome grin. You were too late.
Lucy swallowed a scream as a dull popping noise echoed throughout the room.
The red light had vanished. She had done it. Incredibly anticlimactic, barely a whimper, but she’d done it.
Swaying on her feet, Lucy doubled over and hugged her knees. The Tesla Egg dropped onto the floor. Icy sweat dripped from her forehead to her lips.
She glowered up at the clock. Not quite a dragon but she’d vanquished it all the same. Lucy snatched up the tourmaline and the egg and walked slowly up the stairs to the second floor. Temperance in one hand; excess in the other.
It was up to Lucy to choose. She brushed away a fresh drop of blood from her nose.
Now she understood why Tesla had hidden his laboratory within the New Yorker Hotel and protected it with a Faraday cage—because a Faraday cage was the only way to guard against an EMP.
He’d been protecting his research from people like himself.
And Lucy.