Sherry Ficklin: Extracted

“Come in,” Gloves says after Stein’s knock. A rush of hot steam and smoke billows out the door into the hall, overtaking the other, more pleasant smells.

“I always feel like we’re walking around in a smoker’s lung,” Stein says, motioning for me to go in first.

Gloves’s office is filled floor to ceiling with toy trains that run off of coal. There are stacks of black rock scattered around, and it just happens to be Gloves’s favorite interior design element.

“Sir?” I call out to get his attention. It’s almost impossible to see anything other than the smoke. Beside me, Stein coughs and pulls her shirt over her nose and mouth.

“I’m here,” Gloves says. “Follow the red locomotive.”

Taking Stein’s hand, I lead her through the maze of coal piles behind the red toy train. When we complete our journey through the “Land of the Locomotives,” Gloves is in the back of the room, polishing one of his toy engines.

“I need you to go to the Amber Room again,” Gloves says matter-of-factly, rolling his wheelchair closer to where we are standing.

“Why?” Stein demands. The Amber Room isn’t her favorite place. Actually, though she’d probably never admit it, the place creeps her out. The Amber Room is a chunk of eighteenth-century Russian royal palace. It’s beautiful, all covered in gold leafing and mirrors. But every time we go there for something, she gets tense and jumpy. I’m not sure even she knows why. When I ask, she waves it off, but I can see the change in her expression. How she clenches her teeth and cracks her knuckles just talking about it. Her annoyance radiates off her like heat waves.

“This time you need to retrieve the hairbrush from the vanity in the northeast corner.”

I can see Stein is about to protest, but I interrupt her. “Sir? With all due respect, this is our third trip to the Amber Room. Even if we manage not to overlap ourselves, the stream around it is already weak. Is it worth the risk?”

He glares at me. His normally white muttonchops are black with soot and his face is etched with grime. I fold my arms over my chest. It’s a valid question. Risking a paradox by going back to a place and time we’ve already been is just stupid. All it takes is one touch, one second of physical contact, to unravel the time stream. Granted, there are precautions we can take to prevent it, but it’s a bit like Russian roulette. Eventually, someone’s going to bite the bullet.

“If you must know,” Gloves says, “we’ve stolen it.”

It takes me a second to process that. I look at Stein. Her face is neutral though her voice is edged with disbelief.

“What do you mean, you stole it? You stole a whole room?”

Gloves nods.

I hold up a hand. “Wait a second. Why steal the whole room? Why not just take whatever you wanted to begin with?”

Gloves sighs. Turning his back to us, he picks up an old pocket watch and begins dismantling it as he speaks. “It’s a very long story. Suffice it to say that there is an object inside that Tesla wants. And he wants it so badly that Helena—the woman who discovered the object—stole it from Tesla, and hid it somewhere inside. The problem is that she was never able to tell us what it was or where in the room she hid it. But make no mistake, whatever it is, it’s dangerous. That’s why we stole the Amber Room and hid it in time so Tesla will never find it. We are taking it apart piece by piece to find what we are looking for, testing everything as we go.”

“Why not just take a big group and clear the whole room?” I ask.

Pocket watch innards fly through the air as he jams the screwdriver in too far. “The time bubble holding it is fragile. Too many Rifters coming through at once might damage it. Stewart Stills created it, much like the bubble that surrounds the Hollow Tower now, but because it exists out of its original time, it must be explored carefully.”

Stein cocks her head to the side. “Why don’t you just ask Helena about it?”

Gloves slams his fists into the workbench, sending tools and tiny pieces of trains flying. I’m so caught off-guard by his response that I take an involuntary step back. I don’t think I’ve seen Gloves lose his temper. Ever.

“Because she’s dead,” he says through clenched teeth. “And traveling back into her timeline isn’t an option.” Dropping the remnants of the watch, he turns back to us. “Do you really think you’re the first team we’ve sent in there? We’ve all done missions to the Amber Room. Some of us more than once. We stagger the rifts out as much as possible, but our repeated visits are weakening the time bubble Stills placed it in. It’s collapsing. Our time to find the object is running out.”

He lowers his head, glaring at us, daring us to defy him.

It’s all I can do not to cough my response. “Yes, sir.”

“Have you had the beef stew?” Gloves asks out of nowhere. Gloves is always distracted with weird stuff like that. It’s one of the reasons we aren’t supposed to have sugary sweets in the Tower. He says it rots our minds and bodies, makes us lose focus. We have a running bet that he knows firsthand.

I shake my head.

“Not yet, sir,” Stein says. She looks at me with a worried look.

I shrug my shoulders.

“You need to go eat,” Gloves says. “But let me make your Contra before you go.”

He putts over to a fish tank that is illuminated by a wall of small, cast-iron furnaces. Snails with geared shells hold tightly to the inner wall. He reaches over the side of the reservoir like a kid reaching into a cookie jar and pulls four snails from their home, bringing them over to us. Twisting the gears on the shell, he removes the slimy bodies and tosses the slick creatures back into the tank.

“I’ve never seen him actually make the Contra,” Stein whispers out the side of her mouth while watching him intently.

“The time stream is a very unique organism. Every time that exists in the past, present, and future, and every event in it, has a unique frequency.” One by one he cracks open the geared-shells until he holds four pieces in his hand.

“These snails are a very unique hybrid of mollusk, part invertebrate, part machine,” Gloves explains. “They secrete a neural stimulant that attaches to basal ganglia at the base of the brain. This neural stimulant is what fires a specific neural pathway in your brain that resonates at the same frequency to the specific time you are traveling to.”

“So those shells have the chemical in them that makes Contra?” Stein asks.

“Correct. After I get done cooking these shells, the chemical with the correct time frequency will be contained in the little green pill you have all learned to rely on.”

Gloves takes the shells over to one of the small furnaces on the back wall of his office. This particular cast-iron furnace door has a dial on it. He removes a steel tray and sets the shells on it.

“Consider this oven the tuning fork for the time stream resonations. When the Contra is done, it will have the exact date and time to the Amber Room and the exact date and time for you to get back to the Tower. The chemical inside will stimulate a neural pathway in your brain with the same frequency so you can make it there and back safely.”

He slides the tray with the geared shells inside. With a small click, the door latches closed. Turning the dial as if he were opening a safe, Gloves puts the Amber Room time in for us so we don’t overlap ourselves. After unlatching the small furnace door, he removes the tray, discards the shells, and hands us four small green pills. “You will leave first thing tomorrow.”

Stein and I take our Contra and follow the red locomotive back to the door of his office. Relieved to be out of the hot, smoke-filled room, I wipe my brow.