by Alan Gratz
“What? You don’t think I’m still working for that madman, do you?” Fergus asked.
“No, no. That beeping noise you’ve been hearing!” Tesla ran to a cart of lektric machines and rifled through them. He found what he was looking for, hooked wires to it, and clicked it on.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. The sound came out of a little round mesh screen.
“Aye, that’s it! That’s what I keep hearing,” said Fergus. “Is that what’s doing it? Crivens, it’s annoying.”
“No, no. This is just a receiver. Your tattoos turned you into one too when they detected the signal. I suspect that’s what that configuration was at the small of your back. The one we couldn’t identify. Just above your—”
“Where’s it coming from then?” Hachi asked.
“What? Oh. That black Tik Tok, I suspect,” Tesla said. “It’s a sort of an auditory … beacon. A homing beacon. With a device like this, Edison can follow it right to its source.”
“And it’s just going to hide out from us until Edison gets here,” Hachi said, looking up into the maze of walkways and corridors and caverns inside the enormous power station. “The reprogrammed Tik Toks were just to keep us busy.”
“We cannot let Edison find this place,” Archie said. “Can you imagine what he could do with all this lektricity?”
From the looks on their faces, each of them had different ideas of what that would mean, and none of them were pleasant.
“How did it get in here?” asked Hachi. “What happened to that lightning room back at the entrance? Shouldn’t that have kept it out?”
Tesla’s dark eyebrows went up. “Oh. Oh dear. I suppose in all the excitement I … I left the door unlocked.”
Fergus snapped his fingers, making a little spark. “The Franklin Cage! Mr. Tesla, if we trap the meka-ninja in the Franklin Cage, would the lektrical current block the signal?”
“It’s possible. Yes. Yes, I think it would! In theory, it will reduce the radio frequency’s lektromagnetic radiation, which—”
“Great,” Archie interrupted. “But how do we get it in there?”
“It’s following Fergus,” Hachi said. “We get the rayguns,” she said pointedly, “then we leave, and Tesla locks Mr. Shinobi in the room on the way out.”
“Yes. Yes!” Tesla said, running for a large metal door set into the rock wall. “Here.” Tesla tapped a series of numbers on a flat, glowing keypad, and the door rolled open with a clink and a hiss. Inside were racks and racks filled with oscillators, aether pistols, wave cannons, and more weapons Archie had never seen before. Hachi’s eyes went wide.
“Mr. Tesla, come with us,” Archie said. “Help us.”
“What? Leave Atlantis Station? Oh, no. I haven’t been outside since … um, what year is it?”
“Eighteen seventy-five,” Fergus told him.
“Oh. Oh dear. No, really? That long?” Tesla shook his head. “No. If I go out there, I’ll hear them. They’ll whisper to me. I’ve been touched, you see. By the Mangleborn. Just like you. No. Too easy for me to be lost. I’m safer in here.” He looked around at the walls as though frightened of what might lie beyond. Archie wasn’t thrilled to know that the thing that scared Tesla most was the same kind of connection each of them shared with the Swarm Queen.
Hachi pushed oscillating rifles and aether pistols into the boys’ hands. “We need someone to shut that Tik Tok in the lektric room behind us anyway,” she said. “Somebody has to stay behind.”
“Are there any more Septemberists who can help us?” Archie asked Tesla. “You have to know lots.”
Tesla shook his head. “All enthralled with those bug things. Every last one of them.”
Archie’s heart sank. How could three kids and a Mark II Machine Man ever hope to defeat a Mangleborn?
Hachi came out of the weapons vault with a Chenault-Duffier personal wave cannon on her hip. “Let’s do this.”
They hurried toward the corridor that led back outside. Archie glanced over his shoulder and saw the meka-ninja’s red eyes glowing in the shadows.
“It sees us!” Archie said. “It’s coming!” They had to move more slowly to stay with Fergus, and the meka-ninja gained on them quickly.
“Go, go, go, go!” Hachi cried. She turned and fired the wave cannon—wom-wom-wom-wom-wom. The walls shuddered and floor tiles shattered, but Mr. Shinobi jumped acrobatically out of the way of the wave pulse.
Archie burst through the outer door into the misty Cave of the Winds. Mr. Rivets came next, and Fergus hopped through after him. Hachi backed through, her Chenault-Duffier personal wave cannon at the ready, but Archie and Fergus slammed the door on the meka-ninja before it could slip out. Clang! The hinges rattled as Mr. Shinobi slammed into the door, but it held.
Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk. Archie recognized the sounds of the automatic locks clicking into place.
“Tesla got it!”
The door began to hum, and Fergus grabbed Archie and Hachi and pulled them away. “Um, I think you guys better step back from the door.”
Spray from the waterfall sizzled as it hit the lektrified surface. Inside, the meka-ninja beat against the walls of its cage.
“If that thing’s trapped in there, how’s Tesla ever going to get out?” Archie asked.
“Don’t know. It’s clockworks, yeah? It’ll run down eventually, won’t it?” Fergus asked.
“Perhaps not, sir,” Mr. Rivets told him. “From the placement of the imported machine man’s mainspring key, I believe it to be capable of winding itself.”
“A self-winding machine man?”
“Yes, sir. A feature wished for among many Self-Determinalists, some of whom have set up FreeTok communities among the western tribes and in Brasil. But the notion is still rather uncommon here in the United Nations.”
“We’re wasting time,” Hachi said. “We have to go back to Florida. Now.”
“No,” Archie said. “We have to find the Great Bear’s tomb. The bearskin, remember?”
“Archie, we have very big guns,” Hachi said. “We don’t need to go on a snipe hunt for this magical pelt.”
“Look, it’s my parents who are down there doing whatever the Swarm Queen tells them to, and I know that we’ve only got until the next full moon before Malacar Ahasherat is strong enough to get out. I want to get back down there faster than anybody. But we need that pelt. I know it. We can’t beat the Mangleborn without it!”
“How are you so sure?”
Archie didn’t want to say because I’m the only one of us who’s useless and I need it, but that’s the way he felt. “I just—I just am,” he told them.
Hachi scowled, then let out a heavy sigh. “It’s your parents.”
She climbed down the rocks toward the waterfall, and Fergus gave Archie a supportive nod before following her down. Archie was glad for the vote of confidence.
He just wished he could give himself one as well.
19
The leaves were just beginning to change in Nova Scotia. A sea of red and yellow and orange stretched out beneath the Hesperus as it skimmed the treetops, the real ocean a misty blue line on the horizon. If he had been outside on the airship’s gangplanks, Archie could have reached out and plucked a handful of maple leaves from a branch, could have smelled the salt in the air and soared like a hawk on the wind. He’d watched the airship sail over plenty of impressive vistas before, from cities to mountains to swamps, but he had never thought before how beautiful the world was in all its varied colors and shapes. It was almost inconceivable that the Mangleborn—hideous, monstrous things so different, so alien—lay just under the surface. He could see why the world above would believe the Mangleborn were just myths. Scary stories told to keep children in their beds. How could there be such awful monsters in a beautiful place like this?
But Archie knew better.
He caught sight of himself in the reflection of the airship’s window—a white-haired, serious boy he barely recognized—and looked back at th
e scrapbook from Uncle John’s office. Why did John have it? What did it mean? What were Archie’s parents and Mr. Rivets not telling him?
Archie remembered the last time his family had taken the Hesperus on a trip. A family vacation last year to the Jersey Shore. He’d loved running along the boardwalk, eating iced cream, riding the steamcoasters, playing the carnival games and the penny arcade. Had his parents been studying him then, the way Uncle John had? Making little notes about his taste in desserts, his aim in skeeball, the number of prizes he won in the ring toss? Had Mr. Rivets secretly snapped a photo of him swinging the hammer on that faulty strength-testing machine, the one so rigged one hit sent the bell on the top flying into the surf? Was there another scrapbook hidden somewhere in his own home, filled not with his parents’ happy memories of their son, but instead with clinical, dispassionate observations about his behavior?
And yet all Archie could remember was his father rolling up his sleeves to play the pneumatic Whack-a-Mole, his mother’s delight at the puppet show, her laughter carrying on the wind above the dull growl of the waves. His parents trailing behind him, arm in arm, smiling at him as he ran ahead. Try as he might, he couldn’t see them any other way.
And yet they knew some secret about him. Some secret they had ordered Mr. Rivets not to tell him.
Across the cabin, Fergus slept, and Hachi muttered her list of names over and over again in her hammock.
Archie turned back to page one and read the scrapbook about himself all over again.
* * *
Mr. Rivets anchored the Hesperus in a clearing in Kejimkujik National Park in Nova Scotia, and Archie switched out the machine man’s Airship Pilot talent card for an Explorer card.
The Great Bear Monument in Kejimkujik National Park, according to Mr. Rivets’ internal copy of Avery’s Library of Universal Knowledge (seventh edition), was considered by the Mi’kmaq tribe of the Wabanaki Confederacy to be the Great Bear’s final resting place. The monument itself was a group of seven large stelae surrounded by a scattering of smaller stones, spread out over a clearing the size of a city block. Legend had it that the Great Bear had pulled trees from the ground to make the clearing, and arranged the massive standing stones himself before he died.
“He built his own mausoleum?” Fergus asked. “That’s morbid.”
“It was probably built later, using steam-powered wagons to move the stones from the quarry and pneumatic cranes to lift them into place,” Hachi said. She glanced at Archie. “If there really was a Great Bear to begin with at all.”
“He was real,” Archie told her. “He was a Leaguer. The book said so. And this is where he’s buried.”
The stones lay beyond a small wooden building with a sign that said GREAT BEAR MONUMENT INFORMATION CENTER AND GIFT SHOP.
“Oh, a gift shop!” Fergus said. “I love gift shops.”
The Information Center and Gift Shop was light on the information and heavy on the gifts. Hachi picked up a plush stuffed polar bear from a table full of them while Fergus tried on a fake white bearskin cape.
“Get me—I’m the Great Bear,” he said. “Raaaaaaaaaar.”
Hachi tossed the stuffed bear back on the pile. “I don’t suppose anyone cares that there isn’t a polar bear around for a thousand miles.”
Archie spun a rack of airship key chains meant to look like little Great Bear clubs.
A woman in a brown Acadia Park Service uniform with ranger badges sewn onto it came out of the back room to greet them. Her skin was brown like most First Nations people, but her light hair and thin face said she had Acadian blood in her too.
“Comment pouvoir je vous aide?” she asked.
Archie looked helplessly at the others. He couldn’t speak Acadian. “Um, we’d like to see where the Great Bear is buried,” he said loudly.
The woman smiled at him. “Ah. Yankees, yes?” she said in heavily accented Anglish.
“I’m Seminole,” Hachi said.
“You are a long way from home, yes?”
“Yes,” Archie said. “Is the Great Bear buried here? We’d like to see his tomb.”
“Ah, well, zer is no tomb, I am afraid. Just ze monument. We are not sure ze Great Bear really exzisted at all. But it is a wonderful legend, and very important to ze Mi’kmaq.”
Archie tried to ignore Hachi’s I told you so look.
“Well, I suppose we’d still like to have a look around anyway. While we’re here,” he said. The woman had to be wrong. The Great Bear had to be buried here. And his pelt had to be with him.
“Zertainly. Are your parents wiz you?”
“Their care has been entrusted to me, madam,” Mr. Rivets said. “I am their tutor, Mr. Rivets.”
“Well, we have a brochure here, if you like, or zere is an audio tour on wax cylinder for fifteen cents, with a ten-cent depozit.”
Archie glanced at Mr. Rivets, but the machine man shook his head. “I apologize, Master Archie. My meager financial reserves have been depleted. If you would like, I could go back to the airship and see if any more money can be found.”
Hachi grumbled something in Seminole and pulled a dollar coin out of her bandolier. “Trois, s’il vous plaît,” she told the ranger.
“Oh! And a postcard,” Fergus said. He grabbed one with an aerial photo of the monument and slipped it onto the counter.
Hachi gave him a tired look.
“What? I promised Mrs. Henhawk I’d write,” Fergus told her.
The ranger laid three portable personal gramophones on the counter. They were small brass tubes with grooved wax cylinders around the outside. Rubber hoses connected the gramophones’ needles to amplification trumpets that fit over the listeners’ ears.
“Just fit ze earphones on your head, like zis,” the ranger told them, “crank ze handle, set the needle, and off you go.”
“Very fancy,” Fergus said as they took the high-tech gadgets outside. “You could sell music cylinders for these. Let you listen to your favorite songs while you walk around.”
“Like ‘Mister Twister, the Melancholy Machine Man,’” Archie said.
“No,” Hachi told him.
The audio tour took them along a gravel path past each of the stelae. The first of the giant standing stones had a series of carved faces running down it. It was a totem pole, chronicling the Great Bear’s ancestors all the way back to an actual bear, which snarled at them from the top of the stone.
Archie glanced back at the Information Center to see if they were being watched, then stepped over the low ropes that separated the path from the standing stones.
“What are you doing?” Hachi whispered.
Archie put a foot on the nose of the face at the bottom and tried to climb. “The book said the entrance to the Great Bear’s tomb was through the mouth of the Great Bear. There’s a big bear with a mouth on top of this stone.”
Archie struggled to get past the third head. He tried to haul himself up on a woman’s ear and slipped, tearing his pants on the rough stone.
“Get down here before you hurt yourself,” Hachi told him.
Archie slid back down reluctantly, knowing he would never make it to the top. Hachi handed her portable record player to Fergus and scurried to the top of the totem pole in half the time it had taken Archie to get a third of the way there.
“There’s nothing here,” Hachi reported. She stuck her hand in the bear’s mouth, showing them that it wouldn’t go in any farther than her wrist. “The inside of his mouth is solid. And we wouldn’t be able to fit inside even if it wasn’t.”
“It has to be somewhere else then,” Archie said.
Hachi humphed and scrambled down again, and they continued with the audio tour.
The voice on the audio recording told them the Great Bear was the son of a human chieftain’s wife and the chief of all bears, who had kidnapped her. By the age of four the boy could wrestle his bear father to the floor; when he was twelve, he bashed his father’s head in with a club and escaped with his mother, w
earing his father’s bearskin as a trophy.
“I guess you could say he’ll always carry a part of his father around with him wherever he goes,” Fergus joked.
The next few stelae recorded the Great Bear’s further adventures in crudely drawn pictures. In one, he called down lightning on the Mi’kmaq chief who had married a servant girl while his first wife, the Great Bear’s mother, had been held prisoner by the Bear Chief. On another, the Great Bear fought a giant snake, his father’s bearskin pelt protecting him from harm.
Archie pointed to it, knowing Hachi was hearing the same description of it.
“Fiction,” she told him.
As they made their way around to the last of the standing stones, Archie had to admit that it was looking less and less likely that there was anything here that could help them. His parents were slavishly doing the bidding of Malacar Ahasherat while he was listening to a boring old historian on an audio tour drone on about stone-carving techniques. What had he been thinking? His parents needed him in Florida, not here in Nova Scotia.
The truth was, he was scared. What could the three of them really hope to accomplish, big rayguns or not? Malacar Ahasherat was a Mangleborn. An ancient being who had terrorized the world over and over and over again, who had fought the greatest heroes in human history. What chance did they really have? What chance did Archie have?
On the last stela, the Great Bear’s wife rescued him after a magical dog made him forget himself and wander the Earth half-crazy and alone, and together they rode off into the clouds on the back of a giant bird, never to be seen again. Hachi was right. This was fiction. All of it. And so was the Great Bear’s pelt.
The needle on Archie’s portable record player scratched to the end of the cylinder and lifted, the audio tour finished.
“All right,” Fergus said. “I’m ready to take the test.”
Archie pulled off his headphones and stared at the giant standing stones around them.
“It’s not here,” Hachi said. She said it quietly, like she was actually making an effort to be nice this time, but she still wasn’t brass-plating it. She was right. Archie knew it now. He’d wasted their time, and put his parents in even more danger.
