Quicksilver (Carolrhoda Ya) - By R.J. Anderson Page 0,1

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My new bedroom was half the size of my old one—58.7 percent smaller, to be exact. I didn’t mind not having a walk-in closet anymore, but I did wonder where I was going to put my workbench and all my tools. Maybe I could take over a corner of the basement, once we finished unpacking.

I sat on the naked mattress and hauled a box onto my lap, my newly shortened nails picking at the tape. It was hard to believe that I was moving into a new house for the first time in my life; even harder to fathom that it was 475 kilometers from the house I’d left that morning. Until last summer I’d always been the girl who spent her holidays camping half an hour away, who had to fake being sick the year her hockey team went to provincials, who’d never been to Disney World or even Canada’s Wonderland, because I couldn’t travel more than fifty kilometers from my hometown without having a seizure. But that problem was solved now—one of the few good things that had come out of my disappearance—and I could go anywhere I wanted.

Except back to my old life, because that would be far too dangerous. Not that there was a lot about being Tori Beau-grand that I was going to miss, especially not after that ugly breakup with Brendan just before I went missing and the way Lara had reacted afterward when I didn’t want to talk about where I’d been. The only real friend I had left in Sudbury now was Alison, and she’d be safer and probably saner without me.

Or at least I hoped so. Because the alternative was more guilt than I could deal with right now.

I shook off the thought and ripped the cardboard box open, tossing aside my soldering iron, multimeter, and other familiar tools until I found what I’d been looking for. A metal spheroid the size of an orange, featureless except for a circular socket at one end, a tiny aperture at the other, and a thin, dimpled seam running around its equator.

The relay device. The mechanical angel that had followed me all the days of my life, though until recently I’d never suspected its existence. If the liquid-metal chip in my arm was the shackle binding me to my hometown, the relay had been the ball at the end of that invisible chain. But the chip was neutralized now, its programming wiped and its quicksilver sensors disintegrated. And the relay hadn’t shown a flicker of interest in me since.

The device felt cold in my palm, dead as a fossilized egg. But there was still one taunting little light glowing deep inside. And though I’d spent my last two days in Sudbury trying to get rid of the thing, it had resisted all my attempts to destroy it. The hammer had bounced off without leaving a dent; the bonfire hadn’t even scorched its surface; and when I tried dropping it into the middle of Ramsey Lake, it simply hovered beside the canoe, dodging every swipe I aimed at it with my paddle, until I gave up in frustration and retrieved it again.

My last idea had been to lock the relay in a metal box and bury it somewhere deep. But you couldn’t dig far in Sudbury without hitting rock, and I had a bad feeling it’d Houdini itself out of there in a few minutes anyway. And as long as the relay still worked, I couldn’t just leave it behind, because if anyone stumbled across it and set it off, Alison would be the first one to suffer. So I’d given up and brought the relay with me, because if it ever woke up again, I wanted to be the first to know. I pulled out the early-warning monitor I’d kludged together from an electromagnetic field detector and my old Nokia phone, and clamped the relay into it.

“Tor—I mean, Niki!” came my dad’s muffled shout. “Pizza’s here!”

Niki. My new name was going to take some getting used to, even though I’d picked it myself. After ruling out all my favorite female engineers and inventors—Mildred was out of the question, and Marie, Grace, and Elizabeth were too old-fashioned for my taste—I’d taken a different tack and settled on Nicola. After Nikola Tesla, of course, but a little less Serbian. Or male.

With the new name came a new identity, but I hadn’t yet figured out who Niki was. I knew how she looked