Edison’s Alley by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman Read Free Book Online Page B

untimely demise.
    Jorgenson brought the hammer up once more, and with all his might, he slammed it down on the third shell. It disintegrated in a satisfying burst of silver-green shards. He took a deep breath and
smiled.
    It was time to do the same to Nick.

N ick was not looking forward to his brother’s baseball game after school.
    This should have been a sign that something was off—not only because he loved baseball, but also because he prided himself on being a good big brother, and these days Danny really needed
him. The house fire back in Florida may not have been as momentous as an asteroid strike, but it had been just as devastating to Nick and Danny and their father. Four months was not enough time to
heal from something like that. Nick’s family had changed forever, and it could be years before they truly came to terms with it.
    Perspective. It was a luxury Nick, his brother, and his father simply didn’t have right now.
    Danny’s previous game had ended abruptly when a meteorite the size of a grapefruit was pulled from the sky and into his mitt. He took to the field alone a few nights after that, pulling
dozens more from the sky with the Tesla-modified glove, hoping beyond hope that wishing on the falling stars would bring his mother back. The last space rock he had turned in Earth’s
direction was the heavy hitter.
    Now Danny would be in the field again. A different field, to be sure, since the Sports McComplex they had played in was now cratered from meteor strikes. Instead they would be playing in
Memorial Park on Wednesday afternoons, when the diamond was available.
    The park was in an older part of town, fairly close to where Tesla’s laboratory had once stood. With mixed feelings, Nick rode his bike through the neighborhood of old homes and came to a
stop across the street from the site. The lab was long gone, of course; the ordinary tract house occupying the space had an iron fence and two guard dogs to keep away the lunatics who saw it as
hallowed ground.
    That was the problem—it was mostly lunatics. The greatest inventor of all time deserved more than the babbling fringe.
    Such was the brine of Nick’s thoughts as he joined his father in the bleachers while Danny took to the field.
    “He’ll do fine,” Mr. Slate said, clearly trying to convince himself. “Baseball is in his blood. He’ll do fine.”
    Watching Danny play baseball was a rare moment of escape for Nick’s dad. Wayne Slate worked as a copy-machine repairman at NORAD—which would have been fine, if it weren’t for
the fact that Jorgenson, the veritable eye of the Accelerati, had gotten him the job. It was his way of keeping their whole family under his thumb.
    Nick’s dad didn’t know about the Accelerati, of course, or about Tesla’s inventions. Nick wondered, though, if his father knew that it was his very own swing of the
bat—even though it missed the ball that Nick had pitched to him—that had saved the world. Surely he must have suspected, but they had never spoken of it, and Nick doubted they ever
would.
    After that day, Wayne Slate had slipped into a bizarre form of post-traumatic stress. He became busy. Busier than ever before. It was as if keeping the blood flowing to other parts of his body
prevented it from reaching his brain, where he would have to process everything that had happened. And whenever he slowed down, he began to sink like a stone into himself.
    “I’m fine,” he had told Nick and Danny. “Better than fine. The world is saved—we all have a new lease on life, right? I intend to make the very best of
it.”
    They all rose for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” performed by a paunchy middle-aged guy who had once been in a boy band, and then Danny’s team took the field. The woman sitting
next to them on the bleacher kept looking at Nick’s dad out of the corner of her eye. Finally she turned to him and said, “Your son’s the one who caught that meteorite,
isn’t he?”
    Nick