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. 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 group 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 I somehow heard wrong. 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, and probably one of the quickest, 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 for 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’s running out of Contra and can’t rift back to us. We aren’t sure why. You need to go into the stream and find her. The Contra I am going to issue you hasn’t been programmed with a date to leave the stream, so they won’t spit you out. This is important so 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 deep-sea diver’s helmet made of copper, 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 sits there, unmoving, with his helmet plugged into his desk. He communicates using the letters that fall into place with loud clicks. The different time zones being displayed by various clocks are mounted at the top of the 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 the Gear Head 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 the 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.