The League of Seven

by Alan Gratz

“What do we do?” Archie asked quietly. “Memorize yours?”

  “No. What matters is that you believe in something, want something so strongly that it overrides everything else. It has to be something personal. What is it you most want? Why do you seek the Mangleborn’s destruction?”

  “That’s easy,” Fergus said. “It’s my fault Kano and lots of other people have died. If I hadn’t had blinders on, I might have seen what we were doing was wicked. I put science before conscience, and I’m not going to do that again. Ever.”

  “Make it simple. Something you can remember easily.”

  “Yours isn’t simple!” Fergus said.

  “No, but I spent years learning it. You two don’t have that kind of time. Think of something you can tell yourself over and over again to keep your mind on what you have to do. Something you don’t have to think too much about. It should be easy for you, Archie.”

  Archie knew what she meant—the whole reason he wanted to go back to Florida, needed to confront the Swarm Queen again, was to free his parents. That’s all he had to tell himself: Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad.

  But so many things were eating at him. Distracting him. Why was Malacar Ahasherat singing to him of past Leagues? Why did the Shadow in the Cherokee circle dance scare him so much? How had he fallen ten thousand feet from an airship and survived? And the biggest question of all, the one he thought of now whenever he thought of his mom and dad: What secret about John Douglas’ scrapbook had they ordered Mr. Rivets not to tell him?

  “You can’t ignore what’s right for anything,” Fergus said to himself. “That’s mine. You can’t ignore what’s right for anything.” Beside him, Hachi closed her eyes and whispered the names of the hundred slaughtered men of her mother’s tribe again.

  Archie took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind. I have to save Mom and Dad, he told himself. It doesn’t matter what the secret is. “Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad.” Instead of wondering what they did and didn’t know, what they were and weren’t telling him, he focused on the things that connected them, the things he loved about them: the picnics on blankets on the floor of the family observatory, the vaudeville shows and Philadelphia Athletics lacrosse games they’d seen together in the city, the winter nights reading The Adventures of Professor Torque and His Amazing Steamboy aloud by the fire. This was the mom and dad he wanted to save. The mom and dad he needed to save. They were his entire life. If he could just keep those images in his head, he could stand up to Malacar Ahasherat—in the real world, and in his head.

  “Save Mom and Dad,” he whispered. “Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad.”

  Other voices joined their whispered mantras—jeering, yelling voices from far down the street. A mob with torches and oscillators and axes was headed their way.

  Fergus nudged Hachi, and she broke from her trance. “The Pinkertons are back!” he told her.

  Hachi stood. “Some of them, yes. But it looks like they’ve brought friends. We’ve got to get inside and warn Ms. Ambrose.”

  “What? Why? Who is it?” Archie asked.

  “The Pinkertons have whipped up a mob of Cherokee,” Hachi told them, “and they’re coming to attack the school.”

  26

  The door to the room flew open as Archie, Hachi, and Fergus climbed back inside. It was Ms. Ambrose, looking pink and flushed again.

  “Ms. Ambrose! There’s a mob outside!” Hachi said. “They’re coming for the school!”

  “I know, dear. We’ve already been targeted for letting in anyone from any tribe, and I’m afraid the ball tonight brought us too much attention.”

  “It’s the Pinkertons,” Hachi said. “They’ve stirred them up.”

  “They must have figured out your friend sent them on a snipe hunt,” said Fergus.

  “We’re barricading the front door to hold them off,” Ms. Ambrose said. “We’ll send you along through the tunnel to the Buck Head Tavern. They may have men there, but you’ll stand a better chance of escaping if—”

  “No!” Hachi said. She dashed out the door, leaving the headmistress spinning in her wake.

  “Where is she going? What’s she—we have to get you to the tunnel,” Ms. Ambrose said.

  “You don’t really think we’d leave you in the lurch, do you?” Fergus said, hurrying to join Hachi.

  “It’s our fault they’re coming here!” Archie said, following close behind.

  From the balcony overlooking the great hall, they saw Hachi undoing all of Ms. Ambrose’s orders. She had the girls moving the furniture away from the front door and piling it against the interior doors instead.

  “What are you doing?” Ms. Ambrose cried, hurrying down the stairs. “You’re going to let them in!”

  “They’re going to get in anyway,” Hachi told her. “This way we can control where they go.”

  Ms. Ambrose nodded for the girls to do as Hachi said, and they went back to moving tables and chairs.

  “You have rayguns?” Hachi asked Ms. Ambrose. The headmistress, usually so in control, stammered and spun about as though trying to think what to do.

  “Ms. Ambrose! Rayguns? Aether pistols? Oscillators? Anything?” Hachi asked.

  “Yes. Two. In the safe upstairs. The combination is—”

  “I know the combination!” Hachi said, already on the run. “I cracked the safe in my second year!”

  Archie met Hachi on the stairs running down as she was running up.

  “Archie, archery.”

  “What?”

  “Archery! The school teaches archery!” she yelled before she disappeared down the hall.

  Archie found a bewildered girl in a nightshirt on the landing. “Are you in the archery club?” he asked her. She shook her head, a little lost. “Do you know someone who is?” Archie pressed her. She nodded. “Find them. Tell them to bring bows and arrows. Do you understand? It’s important!”

  The girl seemed to wake up and she nodded, hurrying off.

  “I need some ladies’ underpants,” Fergus said. Two or three of the girls nearby stopped and stared at him. “For the static! The charge!” he said, his face burning red. “Seriously.”

  A tall, pretty Cherokee girl in a white nightshirt took Fergus’ hand and pulled him off toward the dorm rooms.

  The room around Archie was busier than the Pennsylvania Pneumatic Post Office. Girls in various stages of dress ran here and there, but Archie didn’t know what to do. Finally Hachi came sprinting back down the hall with two rayguns in hand: an aether pistol and an old oscillating rifle.

  “Hey! Should I have one of those?” Archie asked.

  “Not if we actually want to hit anything with them,” Hachi told him. “Meghan!” she called. A girl a few years older than Hachi glided over, her nightdress flowing like a cape. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail behind her heart-shaped face.

  Hachi tossed her the aether pistol. “You’re in charge of the other side of the balcony. Don’t shoot until they’re all the way inside.”

  Meghan activated the aether pistol’s aggregator, and the raygun hummed. “In cauda venenum,” she said with a little giggle.

  “Go, go,” Hachi told her, and Meghan was off.

  “Friend of yours?” Archie asked.

  “She was my Latin tutor.”

  Ms. Ambrose hurried up to them. “We’re ready downstairs.”

  “And I think we’re ready upstairs. I’ve told everyone what to do,” Hachi said.

  “Not me!” Archie said. “What do you want me to do?”

  Hachi looked like a parent whose five-year-old asks to help fix the family airship. “You can…” She looked him up and down, and Archie knew she was struggling to find any job for him that would be in the least bit useful. “You’ve got the pelt. You can go in and drag people to safety who’ve been hurt.”

  Crash! The big double doors downstairs lurched with the force of the mob, but held. For the moment.

  “Hannibal is at the ga
tes!” Ms. Ambrose announced, her authoritative tone restored. “Prepare yourselves, girls!”

  The room cleared, girls disappearing into whatever places Hachi had told them to hide. The doors rattled again, and the bar across them cracked. Archie slumped at the top of the stairs. The battle of Lady Josephine’s Academy for Spirited Girls was about to be fought, and he was relegated to field nurse. Some hero he was turning out to be.

  The doors surged and cracked. One more push and the mob would be through. Ms. Ambrose came to the rail to address her charges.

  “Remember the motto of our immortal founder Lady Josephine, girls! Flectere si nequeo superos, Achaeronta movebo. ‘If I cannot move heaven, I shall raise hell.’”

  The doors shattered to pieces, and the mob of Pinkerton agents and Cherokee stormed into the great hall with murder on their faces.

  “Ladies,” Ms. Ambrose cried, “raise hell!”

  The archery club popped up from behind the rail on the balcony, arrows notched and bows drawn, their nightshirts making them look for all the world like Amazon warriors in tunics. They loosed a flurry of arrows to the screams and cries of the mob below. The mob retaliated with a blaze of raygun fire that blew chunks off the railing.

  “Lacrosse team!” Hachi yelled. “Close quarters, attack!”

  Screaming past Archie down the stairs came two dozen girls in wire masks and plaid skirts, their lacrosse sticks raised high. They flew into the stunned mob below, knocking away rayguns and torches and delivering a few good licks to men’s heads and crotches. With the mob engaged on the ground, the archers popped up from behind the balcony again, firing at the attackers when they had a clear shot. Hachi and Meghan did the same with their rayguns from opposite sides of the room.

  Archie saw a girl struck with the butt of a raygun and he was off down the stairs, the pelt draped over his head like a furry ghost. He grabbed the dazed girl up by the arms and dragged her to the stairs as the fight raged around him, rayguns blaaating, arrows ffffffffting, lacrosse sticks clacking. An oscillator blast caught him in the back—bzaaat!—and he staggered. He felt the heat on his skin, but he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even hurt. The pelt worked! It must have been the pelt that had saved him from his fall!

  Archie dragged the girl to safety, where she was immediately tended to by some of the girls who hadn’t been sent in to fight. Wading back into the battle with more confidence now, Archie let the raygun blasts and axes and torches hit him as he saved more of the fallen girls. With the Great Bear’s pelt, he was invulnerable. If only a warrior like Hachi would wear it, she would be invincible!

  Hachi’s barricades kept the mob contained, but they were gaining ground. Soon they would be up the stairs and into the balconies, and from there they would be into the dorm rooms.

  Fergus hobbled up with the beaming Cherokee girl on his arm as Archie pulled another student from the fray. “I’ve got a bit of charge!” he said. He rubbed his fingers together, and they crackled with lektricity. “I could stun the lot of them, I think, if only I could hit them all at once.”

  “The founder’s statue!” Archie said. “If we tipped it over into the middle of them, Fergus could—”

  “No,” Ms. Ambrose and Hachi said together. “Nobody knocks Lady Josephine down,” Hachi told them. Ms. Ambrose nodded curtly.

  “All right then,” Fergus said. “How attached are you to the chandeliers?”

  Ms. Ambrose and Hachi looked up as one and seemed to agree that the chandeliers were expendable. Ms. Ambrose stepped up to the balcony rail as Hachi aimed her aether pistol.

  “Ten Thousand!” Ms. Ambrose yelled. “Return to Greece!”

  Somehow the girls still fighting below understood this meant retreat, and within moments they were backing up the stairs, still under attack from the mob. Hachi wasted no time. Bzaaat. Bzaaat. The chains holding the chandeliers snapped and their gas lines exploded, blowing upside-down craters in the ceiling. The chandeliers fell two stories and smashed to the floor, pinning the men at the front of the attack and forcing the others to climb over them to get upstairs.

  Archie saw Fergus limping down the stairs and knew he would never make it in time to catch the men on the chandeliers. Fergus seemed to realize the same thing, and he jumped on the banister and rode it down instead, his kilt flying. He hit the bottom of the rail and toppled off into one of the chandeliers with an oof.

  “That’s him! That’s the one Edison wants!” a Pinkerton in the crowd yelled. One of them reached for him, but Fergus grabbed both chandeliers first. Fzzzzzzzzzt. Yellow-blue lektricity danced across the metal light fixtures, catching what was left of the mob in its death grip. The invaders kicked and thrashed, but Fergus held on until the last of his lektric charge had crackled away and all the attackers lay stunned. One or two had escaped Fergus’ blast, but the archers in the balconies chased them off. The Battle of Lady Josephine’s Academy for Spirited Girls was over. The home team had won.

  Archie, Hachi, and Ms. Ambrose hurried down the stairs, followed by half the school. Fergus slumped against the base of Lady Josephine’s statue, bruised and spent.

  “Raise hell,” he said with a grin as Archie and Hachi helped him to his feet. “I like that. It’s a good motto.”

  To everyone’s surprise—Fergus’ most of all—Hachi gave him a kiss.

  The doors banged open again and a new wave of men came pouring in. A First Nations man in a black uniform led the charge, an ivory-handled aether pistol in his hand. The archers in the balcony drew their bows.

  “Nae, don’t!” Fergus cried. “This’ll be the cavalry, then.”

  Ms. Ambrose put a hand up, and the Amazons in the balcony held their fire. Sheriff Sikwai took a quick look around at the bodies on the floor and the girls in the balcony and holstered his gun.

  “Get these men out of here and lock them up,” he said. The deputies behind him stowed their weapons and started to drag the moaning bodies away.

  “Sheriff,” Fergus said by way of hello. He limped forward and put his hand out. The sheriff narrowed his eyes at him for a moment as if trying to decide if he knew Fergus.

  “Fergus MacFerguson,” Fergus said.

  “I know who you are,” the sheriff said, finally deciding to shake Fergus’ hand. “I think.”

  Fergus frowned at that, but Ms. Ambrose was already there, offering the sheriff her hand. “Amelia Ambrose, headmistress. You’re a bit late to the party, Sheriff.”

  “So I see. Sorry. We’ve had riots like this all over town tonight. We came as soon as we could, but it looks like you and your girls can take care of yourselves.”

  “We had a little help,” said Ms. Ambrose.

  Sheriff Sikwai nodded, staring at Fergus again. Archie looked to Fergus for some clue about why the sheriff was so interested in him, but Fergus seemed as mystified as anyone.

  “All right then,” the sheriff said, finally turning back to the headmistress. “We’ll clean up for you. And I’ll leave a couple of men at the door for the night.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff. My girls will sleep better for it. If I can get them to sleep at all.” The balconies and stairs were filled with chattering girls animatedly reliving the battle.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Sheriff Sikwai said. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. It was a letterpress flier with a hand-drawn likeness of Fergus’ face—black tattoos and all. Across the top the word WANTED appeared in all capital letters. “I don’t suppose any of you have seen this boy, have you?” Sikwai asked.

  The four of them stood stunned. Of course they’d seen him. Fergus was standing right there! Ms. Ambrose opened her mouth to speak, but she couldn’t find words.

  “The Pinkerton Agency delivered this by pneumatic post tonight. I expect they delivered one to every other sheriff in these parts too. Says here this boy’s wanted for destruction of property, theft, and murder. Also says he’s traveling with accomplices.” The sheriff turned the flier around to read from it. “A boy with white hair, and a
Seminole girl with a scar on her neck.”

  Fergus, Archie, and Hachi exchanged horrified looks.

  The sheriff shook his head. “I don’t know. Me? I look at this picture”—he looked up at Fergus again, his eyes narrowed like before—“and I just don’t see a criminal.”

  “Neither do I, Sheriff,” Ms. Ambrose said, cottoning on at last. “But we shall watch out for him, nonetheless.”

  “You do that,” Sheriff Sikwai told her. “And you,” the sheriff said, staring pointedly at Fergus, “you keep feeding the good wolf.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The sheriff rounded up his men, and they herded the last of the dazed mob out the door.

  “Your last name is MacFerguson?” Hachi asked him when the sheriff and his men were gone.

  “Never mind that,” Archie said. “Destruction of property? Theft? Murder?”

  “I did bring that airship down, and there were a fair number of Edison’s goons on it,” Fergus allowed. “And I suppose Edison sees me as his property, in a way. Or what’s inside me is, at least. Which I stole by running away.”

  “I don’t think I should be hearing any of this,” Ms. Ambrose said. “That sheriff’s done you a great favor in giving you a chance to run.”

  “And letting us know more people will be after us,” Hachi said. “We’ll have to leave right away.”

  “Hachi Emartha, you must stay,” Ms. Ambrose said. “We can protect you.”

  “No, you can’t,” Hachi told her. “And I’ll just run away again.”

  “But your family has been so worried about you. Your aunt—”

  “My aunt only wants me out of the way so she can take over my family’s company.”

  “What company?” Fergus asked. “Hang on. Your last name is Emartha? As in, the Emartha Locomotive and Machine Man Company?”

  Reluctantly, Hachi nodded.

  “At least let us send you off with some food,” Ms. Ambrose said. “Do you have any money? And we’ll need to fetch your Tik Tok for you.” The headmistress waved over another teacher, and students were sent off at a run.

  “The Emartha Machine Man company that has skyscrapers in ten cities?” Fergus said.