Extracted

FIVE

LEX

For Gloves to venture out of his office, something must be seriously wrong.

Stein and I share a worried look over the tech table before he gets to us.

“How did something this small do so much damage?” I ask Nobel, glancing over my shoulder to the gurney behind us where Bruce writhes as some of the Hollows hold him down. His arm has been partially chewed off.

“Are you going to be able to help him?” Stein wonders quietly, following my gaze.

Nobel wipes his forehead with the back of his arm. “I’m going to try.” He rounds the table holding a syringe and heads for Bruce.

Stein shakes her head. “What is this thing?”

I poke the mutilated robot. Glass shards protrude from a hole in the head casing, which was probably once an intact dome. The joints are made with small gears and pistons. It has one arm affixed with a large pincher claw—the other must have been ripped off.

“I have no idea,” I answer honestly. “But this is bad. Really bad.”

I don’t say the next thought that pops into my head, but from the way Stein is looking at me, her face pale and somber, I can tell she’s thinking the same thing. There’s only one place this could have come from. Only one person who could have sent it.

Tesla.

Gloves chugs across the room, stuffing small bits of coal into the furnace of his locomotive wheelchair as he makes his way to us. The look on his face is a combination of fear and worry that leaves deep lines around his eyes and across his forehead. I take a deep breath, preparing for bad news.

“Clear out!” Gloves commands, glaring at the others. Then he points to Nobel, Stein, and me. “Not you three. You stay.”

Nobel nods to Journey. “Take Bruce to my lab. He’s stable for now. I’ll be there shortly.” She nods, and the handful of Hollows who’ve been helping quickly wheel the gurney from the room.

Gloves slumps in his locomotive chair as he delivers the verbal blow. “We have a lost Hollow. Sisson.”

The air goes out of the room like a crashing hot air balloon. For a minute I’m mute, trying to convince myself that I heard wrong somehow. It’s Stein who speaks first.

“Sisson?” she asks, as though she, too, thought she must have misheard. Sisson is a petite girl but more than capable, one of the quickest, and most deadly, of all the Hollows. Stein glances at me with an expression that clearly begs the question: how is that possible?

“Yes. She was commissioned on a mission to the future, and she has been lost in the time stream.”

I frown. Future travel is tricky on a good day, dangerous on a bad one. It’s too fluid—too hard to predict how events will unfold. We go, sometimes, but it’s rare. This is exactly why.

“She missed her check-in time. Another Rifter caught sight of her in the time stream but couldn’t get to her,” Gloves continues.

“So do we have to go into the future or the past?” I ask.

“Neither, Lex. She’s been trapped in the time stream for the last couple of days, from what we can tell. She ran out of Contra and can’t rift back to us. We aren’t sure what happened. You need to go into the stream and find her. The Contra I am going to issue you haven’t been programmed with a date to leave the stream, so they won’t spit you out. You can stay in the stream as long as possible to find Sisson. Once you find her, take these to get you all back here. And you need to do it quickly. Claymore’s leaking.”

What was that supposed to mean?

“Leaking?” I spit out before Stein can beat me to it.

“You know that black liquid in his diver’s helmet?”

Stein and I nod. Claymore wears a massive, copper deep-sea diver’s helmet, and he never takes it off. Heck, I don’t even know if Claymore is a he. The front and side ports are so black and cloudy that I can’t tell if there’s a living head in there or not. The copper is dented, and there’s a pattern of blue-green tarnish all over the helmet that makes it look like a global map from a far-off land.

I mean, the guy can’t even talk. According to Nobel, he’s never uttered a word. A huge arrivals and departures board hangs behind the gnarly old desk where he always sits. He remains there, unmoving, with his helmet plugged into his desk. He communicates using letters that fall into place with loud clicks. The different time zones being displayed by various clocks are mounted at the top of the arrivals and departures board. When I first arrived at the Hollows, Claymore had put up on the board, “GOOD TO HAVE A KID OF YOUR CALIBER AMONGST US HOLLOWS.”

Nobel fidgets with a prototype weapon on the table. “It’s called Medulla Serum. That’s what keeps him ticking. He can only function when his tank is full.”

Gloves explains. “Nobel was able to repair the leak, but he lost a lot of Serum. We sent Sisson to the future to retrieve some more.”

“Why the future?” Stein asks. I shoot a glance at Nobel, wondering why he never mentioned it.

“That is the only place to find it,” Gloves says.

“Wait, this has happened before?” I ask Nobel.

“It did. Before you got here. He lost about seven milliliters before I could stop the leak.”

“Seven milliliters? That isn’t that much,” I say.

“Seven milliliters doesn’t seem like a lot, but it was enough to cripple his ability to monitor the time stream.”

“How many milliliters did he lose this time?” Stein asks, concern growing in her voice.

“Too many,” Nobel answers, looking up at me for the first time.

“If Claymore loses any more Medulla Serum, he won’t be able to make the time stream safe for the Hollows to rift,” Gloves adds. “He won’t be able to monitor ripples, and no matter how well Stills hides our beloved Tower, without Claymore keeping a finger on everything that happens in the time stream, our location could be compromised.”

Staring us down, Gloves adds, “Your whole existence is because of Claymore.”

“Let’s go get Sisson, then,” I say.

“Let me grab the DNA Detector before we go,” Nobel says when we get back to the common room after picking up our Contra. Stein tugs on her long jacket and stuffs a short knife in her boot. Then she gives me a noncommittal shrug that says better safe than sorry. I can’t agree more.

“I’ve got it right here,” I say, handing the device to him.

Rummaging through the tech bench, Nobel opens a wooden box by breathing onto the lock. Inside the box are dozens of test tubes with blood in them. Our blood—DNA samples for such an emergency. He walks his fingers along the corks until he finds Sisson’s sample. With a small dropper, he puts a few drops of her blood into the machine, which then beeps to life.

I realize I’ve never rifted and not been spit out somewhere in history. It’s going to be strange just mucking around in the time stream without any specific destination. The stream can be disorienting at times, painfully mind-bending. That’s why we use the Contra.

We stand in the middle of the common room and swallow the smooth, green pills. The Amber Room mission will have to wait. Priority calls. The Contra that will bring us back is secure in the small hidden pocket inside my vest. All Hollows have one, a secure place to keep their pills.

After Stein takes hers, I hold tight to her hand and smile. Something about Contra creates an almost euphoric effect, and it always makes me happy and tingly inside. As serious as our missions are, some of the side effects are laughing and smiling. We look at each other, and Stein has a huge smile across her face. Nobel smiles behind his surgical mask and his eyes light up and dilate. I glance down at my hand, interlocked with Stein’s, and then at her face as the common room starts to dissolve behind her. Our skin becomes more and more transparent until we are pulled by an invisible rope and stretched into thin strands, like taffy being pulled.

A rush of wind and a blur of colors replace the common room, and usually at this point, we’re spewed out at our destination. This time, though, our transparent bodies start to take form. I watch my hand become denser, more solid. Tiny, skin-colored particles start stacking on top of each other until my hand is fully formed. The process repeats itself on Stein and Nobel.

It’s like my mouth is full of cotton. “You guys feel okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Stein shouts against the wind.

Nobel gives me a thumbs-up.

Pulling the DNA Detector out of his lab coat, Nobel pushes the button. The gears on the end start to spin and suck up wisps of the time stream. He waves it around until the end dips, then lets it pull him toward Sisson.

The DNA Detector pulls Nobel in a zigzag motion through the blur like a Great Dane pulling its master. He motions for us to follow, and Stein and I move behind him, but our movements are slow without the extra pull of the machine. I push forward as sweat rolls into my eyes. I can’t tell if we’re actually making progress or not. There are no reference points, no way to tell if we’re moving at all. I can’t help wondering if the device is really working, or if the DNA Detector is taking us on a wild goose chase. Just wandering like this makes me dizzy. Stein isn’t doing well either. A sheen of sweat is forming right above the cupid’s bow of her lip.

And Stein never sweats.

By the time we get to her, Sisson is lying in the time stream flat on her back. Her clothes are ripped, she’s bleeding, and she’s unconscious. White strands of the time stream have cocooned her, woven into her hair, and are drawing the color from it. Two small robots with glass dome heads are attached to her waist and foot. We hurry over to her and pull her from the invisible hammock. I’m afraid I’m going to pull her arm out of its socket, so instead I bear-hug her and start pulling. Frantically, we work, not knowing what damage the time stream has done to Sisson.

“She’s breathing.” Nobel shakes his head like he’s surprised. “I think the time stream has protected her somehow, kept her alive. That’s why she’s wrapped in that stringy stuff.”

“Can she swallow, though?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Nobel replies. “We need to get these Gear Heads off her.”

Using my fingernail to pierce the hard gel covering of the Contra pill, I pry Sisson’s mouth open and carefully drip the contents under her tongue.

Then I pry the claws of one mechanical creature off her foot as Stein wrestles with the metal lasso that the other has wrapped around Sisson’s waist. She slides it up and off Sisson, along with the machine attached to it. We let them go, and they are blown away. Lost in the time stream.

Good riddance.

I pop a pill into my mouth just as Nobel and Stein do, and we all grab hold of Sisson.

In a blur of motion and color, we are pulled from the time stream. I hold my breath, because returning home always has the sensation of walking under a waterfall without getting drenched. Gloves is already there as we materialize into the common room. Some of the same Hollows that watched us spar are also there, staring with concerned expressions. Low voices whisper to each other around us. Silence sweeps through the room as they see Sisson’s limp, bloody body.

Moving quickly, I lay Sisson on a tattered Oriental rug in the center of the room. Nobel holds her head while I kneel at her side, and Stein stands behind me with her arms folded.

“This should take care of it,” Gloves says, taking a gas mask with a blender attached to the mouthpiece from a compartment in his wheelchair.

Nobel must know the routine, because he takes the rubber mask and slips it over Sisson’s head, securing the leather straps. Gloves turns on the blender and pulls some shimmering gear-shaped items from his blue conductor’s coat pocket. With Sisson’s head laid back, he starts tossing the gears into the blender.

“She’s inhaled too much of the time stream. Remaining in it that long isn’t good for the lungs. This should help flush her system. These nanites will eat the remaining Contra from her blood,” Gloves says over the sound of metal grinding metal.

Sisson convulses. Nobel squats behind her and props her up. Gloves puts his white-gloved hand on her forehead and secures the blender with the other hand.

I see a yellow powder fill the eye ports of the black rubber gas mask. Sisson’s chest heaves in and out as she gasps for air. I can feel my pulse quicken, and it takes all my self-control to not knock Gloves over and tear the mask off. Then her breathing normalizes.

“It’s done,” Gloves says.

I quickly unstrap the mask and watch Sisson’s eyes flutter open. She is mumbling. Stein bends down and strokes Sisson’s sweat-filled hair out of her eyes.

“You’re safe now,” Gloves says, looking sincerely relieved.

Sisson reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small vial of black liquid. With shaking hands, she presses it into Nobel’s palm.

Then her eyes roll back into her head, and she passes out.