The League of Seven

by Alan Gratz

  “One, two, buckle my shoe,” said Mr. Dent.

  Archie pulled back behind the console. “One, two, buckle my shoe. That’s what Mom said to me on the Hesperus, when we got the bug out of her long enough for her to talk. It must be the code to getting through the puzzle traps in the prison. Mr. Rivets, they know enough to set the Mangleborn free!”

  “Continue your work,” Mr. Dent told Edison.

  “Malacar Ahasherat grows stronger. You are a drone in the swarm. Together we will free the queen,” said Mrs. Dent.

  Archie’s parents turned and walked away from the tower, toward the darkness.

  “I don’t need your help,” Edison said once Mr. and Mrs. Dent were gone. “I will be the one to free the Mangleborn. Me, alone. And once they’re free, science will finally advance. Humanity will finally advance. I will be the one to take us out of the dark age of steam and into the bright, shining Age of Lektricity. The future! A drone in the swarm. Ha. I’ll be a hero. The world will worship me! Build statues of me! They will sing songs about me!”

  Edison went back to the console and pushed one of his assistants out of the way.

  “Though I hate to speak ill of any person,” Mr. Rivets said, “I do believe that man’s mainspring is sprung.”

  “Forget that,” Archie said. “What do we do about Mom and Dad, Mr. Rivets?” Archie’s parents were almost beyond the light generated by Edison’s machines.

  “Edison’s work here must be stopped, Master Archie. We cannot allow him to free this Mangleborn or any other. Nor can we allow him to continue his experiments with lektricity. But the more immediate threat, I’m afraid, is your parents. They know too much. Enough to free the Swarm Queen on their own. They cannot be allowed to enter the complex that imprisons the Mangleborn.”

  “But how do we stop them?”

  Mr. Rivets looked down at the raygun in Archie’s hand.

  “Shoot them?” Archie pulled the aether pistol out of Mr. Rivets’ reach. “You want to shoot my parents?”

  “My programming forbids me from purposefully causing injury to human beings, Master Archie. I cannot do it.”

  “Oh. But I can. That’s what you’re saying. You want me to shoot my own parents, Mr. Rivets? That’s clinker!”

  “Language, Master Archie.”

  Archie growled in frustration and ran after his parents. They were headed for a rock wall that stood up from the hill in the darkness. Shoot his mom and dad? Mr. Rivets must have slipped a cog. Archie couldn’t do that! But his parents did seem to know some code to get through the puzzle traps the ancients had left behind to keep anyone from getting to the Mangleborn they’d imprisoned. What if Malacar Ahasherat used his parents to get all the way in and let her out? The Swarm Queen would be loosed on the world without a League of Seven to stop her. Thousands of people would die. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. And then more and more Mangleborn would get free and take over the world. Maybe if he just stunned them. He flicked the raygun’s aggregator off and on and watched the dial reset and begin to rise again.

  Archie caught up to his parents just outside Edison’s circle of light. “Mom! Dad! Please! You can’t do this.”

  His parents kept walking. He checked the aggregator—still not to halfway.

  “You have to stop. I know you’re in there! You have to fight it. You can’t set the Mangleborn free!”

  His parents kept walking. The dial kept rising. Archie couldn’t be sure what was enough aether to stun them, and how much was enough to kill them.

  He raised the aether pistol.

  “Stop. Stop, or I’ll shoot! I will!”

  Archie shrank to the ground as his parents came closer in the dark, and suddenly he was a little boy again, waking to the same nightmare he always had, the one where he was a statue, where he was helpless and couldn’t move, and all he could do was cry out for his parents. And there they were, both hurrying to him in the night, his mother to run her fingers through his hair, his father to whisper that it was all just a bad dream. The way they had always come to him, whenever he needed them. The way they loved him.

  Archie’s parents were on top of him. They weren’t going to stop. The raygun needle was right at the halfway mark. All he had to do was point and shoot. It was now or never—

  And it was never. Archie lowered the raygun, and his parents walked mindlessly past. He was never going to shoot his parents. He couldn’t take the chance that he would hurt them. Mr. Rivets was a Tik Tok. He saw it as a logic problem: shoot two people, save millions. But Archie wasn’t a machine man. He was a human being, and those two people were his parents, and he loved them.

  Archie turned to see where his parents were, and found Edison’s tall black machine man looming behind him, its red eyes blazing in the dark.

  “Gaaaa!” Archie cried.

  Something glinted in the machine man’s hands—a long, curved sword. The Tik Tok slashed it at Archie’s chest. Shink! Archie fell backward onto the wet ground, dropping the aether pistol. His jacket and shirt were sliced clean through, but the sword must have just missed cutting him. The black Tik Tok loomed over him in the darkness, sword held high to strike again, and there was Mr. Rivets. Clang! The two machine men grappled over him like steambots in a Tik Tok prizefight.

  “I thought Tik Toks couldn’t hurt people!” Archie cried.

  “Obviously this machine man was not built to the same exacting standards,” said Mr. Rivets.

  Archie snatched up the aether pistol and ran to where his parents had been, but they had disappeared. Wherever the entrance was to the Mangleborn’s prison, they had gone in.

  “Mom! Dad!”

  The black Tik Tok rolled backward and kicked Mr. Rivets—all one thousand pounds of him—over its head and off into the darkness. He landed somewhere with a rattling thump. Archie aimed the aether pistol at Edison’s machine man, closed his eyes, and squeezed the trigger. Bwaaaaaat. The Tik Tok dodged the ruby red beam and jumped over Archie, knocking him down again with its sword as it passed. Archie kept his finger on the trigger and swung around. Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. The red beam missed the black Tik Tok again and hit the lightning tower instead. Its metal beams turned red hot and began to melt.

  Archie felt his skin prickle. Blue-white lightning flashed in the clouds, and a bolt struck the top of the buckling tower. Shhhh-kooom. The tower lektrified, and white-hot tendrils of lightning jumped from the broken tower to the consoles on the ground—

  KaBOOM.

  Workers and equipment went flying from the clearing in an explosion of fire and sparks. Archie flinched from the blast, his raygun spluttering out. He looked back in time to see the dark silhouette of the killer Tik Tok rise up over him, its sword raised again to strike, and then—thwack—Archie’s world went black.

  5

  Archie was dreaming again.

  His parents were there with him, wearing the same torn and dirty clothes they had worn in the swamp. They were in a small square room made of brass—floors, ceilings, walls, all of it brass. The strangest thing was that every inch of every surface was covered with what looked like empty picture frames. Archie didn’t understand what they were or why they were there.

  THOOM. The room shook. THOOM. The sound came from below, somewhere beneath his feet. Malacar Ahasherat, the Swarm Queen, trying to get out.

  “Three, four, knock on the door,” said the smiling Mr. Dent.

  “Mom! Dad!” Archie cried, but they couldn’t hear him. He reached for his mother, and his hand passed right through her.

  Something shook him, and Archie woke with his face pushed into the damp, mossy ground of the Florida swamp. “Mom. Dad,” he said, still muddleheaded. He remembered now. He had followed them into the darkness. Threatened to shoot them but couldn’t do it. And then the black Tik Tok had come and—

  He looked up to see that same frightening machine man toss somebody next to him—a First Nations girl a little older than Archie. She was thin and tall—taller than Archie, at least, but then m
ost kids his age were—with dark brown skin and black hair. A Seminole, Archie guessed. Maybe Muskogee. A thin red scarf was tied around her neck, and over her simple blue dress she wore a brown bandolier with half a dozen little leather pouches on it. Archie tried to help her up, but she batted him away and sat up on her own.

  All around them, the clearing looked like a war zone. Fires still burned among the broken consoles, even in the rain. Dark shapes that looked like bodies were scattered here and there, and the twisted, still-glowing hulk of the tower loomed over them like the skeleton of a giant monster. The bright lights were gone—most of them destroyed in the explosion—but a few survivors moved among the wreckage with regular old hurricane lamps.

  “Is he awake?” Edison asked. He stood over Archie and the girl, holding a dark-stained handkerchief to his neck. “You’re lucky Mr. Shinobi didn’t kill you,” he told Archie. Edison looked at the black machine man. “It should have. I don’t know why it didn’t.”

  Mr. Shinobi stared at Archie with those glowing red eyes, and Archie put a hand to the place on the back of his head where the machine man had knocked him unconscious. It felt like he was going to be lucky: no lump.

  “So,” Edison said. “The Septemberists send children to do their dirty work now, is it? One of you takes out my tower, while the other one tries to kill me?”

  Edison pulled the handkerchief away from his neck, and Archie could see now it was covered with blood. There was a long, deep cut along the side of Edison’s neck. Archie turned to look at the girl. Had she done that?

  Edison signaled for Mr. Shinobi to take the bandolier off the girl, and he emptied the pockets onto the ground in front of them. It was filled with little brass wind-up animals.

  “Toys,” Edison said, kicking one. “They send children with toys.”

  “Why are you trying to free a Mangleborn?” Archie asked. “Where are my parents?”

  “Mr. Shinobi,” Edison said.

  The black machine man’s torso spun while its head and legs stood still, its long, inhuman arms snapping around like bullwhips. Crack! One of Mr. Shinobi’s metal hands knocked Archie onto the ground.

  “Who else is with you?” Edison asked.

  Archie pulled himself back up, holding the side of his head. He stared at the ground, his ear ringing.

  “Where did you come from? How did you know I was here?” Edison asked.

  The girl said nothing, and Archie certainly wasn’t going to say another word.

  “Mr. Shinobi,” Edison said.

  The black Tik Tok stepped forward again, but a small group of workers with hurricane lamps interrupted them. A short, thick Iroquois man with jet-black hair pulled back into a ponytail spoke for them. “Mr. Edison, sir. We’ve got the rundown on the damage.”

  Edison waved Mr. Shinobi still and beckoned the workers forward. There were five of them, all men and boys, three First Nations and two Yankees. They wore goggles and gloves and coats like Edison, but theirs were sooty and torn and bloody from the explosion.

  “Report, Mr. Henhawk,” said Edison.

  The Iroquois man held the strap of his brass goggles in his hands, turning it nervously. “It’s gone, sir. All of it. The lektrical surge destroyed the Archimedes Engine, and the tower did for the rest.”

  “Seven months,” Edison said. He turned to stare at Archie. “Seven months of work, and a rare old artifact, gone. And the full moon less than two weeks away.”

  There was cold, hard hatred in Edison’s face, and Archie shrank back. This Edison person might actually kill me, he thought.

  “Good riddance, I say,” said Henhawk. “Mucking about down here in this gearforsaken swamp. We should go back to Jersey, work on your idea of a moving picture projector, sir. If people could just see the practical uses of lektricity, maybe they wouldn’t be so afraid of it.”

  “Nae, wait.” A tousle-haired Yankee boy stepped forward. He couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than Archie. Beneath his long, open leather coat, he wore a white button-down shirt, tall white socks, and, Archie was surprised to see, a blue-and-green plaid skirt. “We could build another Archimedes Engine. I’m sure of it,” the boy said.

  Henhawk cleared his throat and smiled. “My apprentice, Mr. Edison. Fergus. And no, Fergus, we can’t just build another. There was only one of them things in the world, and we barely understood how it worked before it got melted.”

  “Nae. I had a look inside it back at the lab, and—”

  “You looked inside it?” Edison said quietly.

  Henhawk glanced protectively at Fergus, but the boy charged ahead.

  “Oh, aye. I know you said not to, but I figured if I could just understand how the dingus worked, we could integrate it with our machinery better.”

  Edison stepped closer. “And did you? Did you understand how it worked?”

  “Well, not entirely,” the boy said. “But I began to see what those Greek nobs who built it all them years ago were up to. It’s really just a series of relays and switches activated by lektrical impulses, innit? With a bit of tinkering I think we could work up a prototype of something like it in just a few months. I drew up plans and gave them to Kano. Mr. Henhawk, I mean.”

  “He mentioned this possibility to you before?” The question seemed meant for Kano Henhawk, but Edison still stared at Fergus.

  “I … well, yes,” Henhawk said. “But the boy’s dreams outweigh his experience, sir. Always have. I was just telling the missus the other day. I said to her—”

  “Kill him, Mr. Shinobi,” Edison said. He pointed to Henhawk. “That one.”

  “What?” Fergus said. “Nae—”

  Mr. Shinobi whipped a short, curved blade out of a hidden channel in its arm and buried it in the Iroquois engineer’s chest. The wide-eyed Henhawk burbled and fell to his knees, and Archie jerked away.

  “Kano! Nae, Kano!” Fergus cried. He ran to Henhawk. “Kano, please. Say something. Kano!”

  But like Archie’s parents in his dream, the Iroquois man didn’t respond. He couldn’t. Kano Henhawk was already dead.

  Fergus’ eyes were wild. He scrabbled backward, and the workers parted for him. He stumbled to his feet and ran for the darkness of the swamp, his legs pumping. Go, go, go, Archie urged him. But at a word from Edison the black machine man was after Fergus, running faster than Archie had ever seen a Tik Tok move. Mr. Shinobi’s short sword flashed again, and Fergus cried out and tumbled to the ground.

  While everyone was watching Mr. Shinobi and Fergus, the girl beside Archie picked up one of the little brass toys Edison had dumped out of her bandolier and hid it inside her dress. Her angry eyes told Archie not to say a word.

  Mr. Shinobi carried Fergus back. One of the boy’s legs ran with blood where the Tik Tok had cut him with its sword, and he was sobbing.

  “I regret that Mr. Shinobi had to hurt you, Fergus, but it’s all for the best,” Edison said. “I’ve been looking for someone who understands the Archimedes Engine the way I do. You’re right—we could, perhaps, build a new one. But not in less than two weeks. Not before the stars are right. If we miss that moment, we won’t have another chance to raise the Swarm Queen for another one hundred and fifty-seven years. I don’t know about you, but the only way I’m going to be around that long is if Malacar Ahasherat makes me into a god. And she might. But first I’m going to have to turn you into an Archimedes Engine.”

  6

  Edison was crazy. Archie saw that now. Absolutely off his rails. But Archie didn’t know what he could do to stop him. Edison ordered Mr. Shinobi to put Archie, Fergus, and the girl in a big wooden crate that some of the equipment had been shipped in, then set his assistants to getting the lektric generator back up and running. Mr. Shinobi shut them inside, its red eyes watching Archie the entire time.

  As soon as the Tik Tok slid the bar over the door to lock them in, the girl began pacing the walls of their small cell. Archie hurried to Fergus.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

>   “Oh, aye. I’m brass,” Fergus whispered. He winced as he said it, his first words since Mr. Shinobi had run him down. His face was ashen, and he was breathing hard.

  Of course he’s not okay, steambrain. He just got cut by that Tik Tok. Fergus’ leg was coated in blood. Archie cupped his hands under some of the water dripping between the cracks in the wooden ceiling and poured it on Fergus’ leg. Fergus hissed in pain.

  Whack! Archie and Fergus jumped as the girl kicked at the wall of the crate.

  “Are you going to help here?” Archie asked her.

  “I am helping,” she said in a quiet, raspy voice. “I’m trying to get us out of here.” Whack! She kicked the wooden wall again, but it didn’t crack.

  Forget her, Archie thought. The cut was behind Fergus’ knee, and it was deep. Very deep. Archie pulled his handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and wrapped it around the cut, then took off his belt and looped it around the handkerchief until he could buckle it tight.

  “I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do,” Archie said.

  “S’all right, mate. Thanks. Name’s Fergus.”

  “Archie. Archie Dent.”

  “Who’s your friend?” Fergus nodded at the girl. She had given up kicking the walls and was sitting cross-legged on the other side of the box now, muttering something under her breath while she worked a beaded bracelet in her fingers.

  “No idea. Your boss said she tried to kill him. Hey, girl. What’s your name?” Archie asked.

  She ignored them, and Archie let it go.

  “Edison said he was going to turn you into some kind of engine,” he said to Fergus. “What did he mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fergus. “The Archimedes Engine is a machine. An ancient Greek artifact. Edison’s agents, they found it in old Aegypt, in Afrika. It’s a … a math engine, is I guess the best way to put it. It does sums automatically. It computes data.”

  Archie had no idea what Fergus was talking about.

  “It’s difficult to explain,” Fergus told him. “I’d never seen anything like it until I went to work for Edison.”