The Monster War

by Alan Gratz

  “Since when do you know how to drive a streetcar?” Archie asked.

  “I’ve had a little practice,” Hachi said.

  “We’re gonna have to get some help burying this guy back in the ground,” Clyde said through Buster’s loudspeakers. “But everybody should be safe for now.”

  “Do you think so, steam man?” Philomena Moffett asked.

  Moffett clung to the top of the upturned statue of Hiawatha still stuck in Cipactli’s tail. Archie ran at her, but she was faster.

  WOMWOMWOMWOMWOM!

  Archie planted his feet and stood his ground against the sonic waves. Behind him, Clyde threw Buster’s arms around the others to protect them from the blast.

  “Ah ah ah,” Moffett said when she’d stopped screaming. “I may not be able to hurt you, Archie, but I can shake that steam man to pieces and do worse to your little friends.”

  Buster’s boiler growled at her.

  “Then what now?” Archie asked.

  “Now you leave me alone,” Moffett told him.

  Clyde laughed. “Yeah, right, lady.”

  “Oh, you will,” Moffett purred. “You know the lektric dynamo that woke your playmate there? I have it.”

  They had been so busy dealing with the Mangleborn, none of them had realized the lektric lights had gone out all over the exhibition grounds. With that lektric dynamo, Moffett could do the only thing worse than turning half the continent into Manglespawn. She could raise Mangleborn.

  “What have you done with it?” Archie demanded. “Where is it?”

  Moffett smiled. “That’s for you to find out. I’ve divided my Shadow League into pairs and sent them to the four winds. One pair has the dynamo. But which one?”

  “Seven cannot be divided into four pairs,” Martine pointed out. “Unless you have cut one of them in half.”

  Everyone looked back at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “The Dragon Lantern and I make a good pair, don’t you think?” Moffett asked, holding it up with one of her tentacles.

  “You’ve got the dynamo,” Hachi said. “You have to. You’d never give up a weapon like that.”

  “Do I?” Moffett asked. She shrugged. “Then follow me, and take the chance that one of the others won’t release a Mangleborn on some unsuspecting city. The choice is yours.”

  Moffett had barely finished when she screamed again. Clyde threw Buster’s arms around the others, and Archie closed his eyes against the sonic waves.

  When the last of the reverberations died away and Archie opened his eyes, Moffett was gone.

  Kitsune hopped up on Buster’s arm. “It’s a trick. It has to be. A good one too.”

  “Given what I know about Philomena Moffett,” Martine said, “there is a 92.5 percent chance she will keep the dynamo and use it herself.”

  Clyde and Mr. Rivets climbed out of Buster’s mouth. “Yeah, but what about that other seven and a half percent?” Clyde asked. “We can’t afford to take that chance.”

  Hachi threw a dagger into the hide of Cipactli. “So what do we do?”

  “We split up,” Fergus said. “We have to.”

  “But we just formed up this posse,” Gonzalo said.

  “And we’re so good together!” Archie said. “We just took down a Mangleborn in minutes!”

  “I don’t see any other way,” Clyde said. “We split up. She said she’s sent her League to the four winds. Hachi, you and Martine go south through the Gulf on Martine’s submarine. Me and Fergus’ll go west in Buster. Gonzalo and Kitsune, you go north.”

  “We won’t cover near as much ground on Alamo as you two’ll cover in The Kraken and Buster,” Gonzalo pointed out.

  “The Kraken has an airship,” Martine told them. “A small one. But big enough for the two of us,” she told Hachi. “We will take the airship south, and Gonzalo and Kitsune can ride The Kraken north.”

  “And who’s going to pilot it?” Kitsune asked.

  “The Kraken can pilot herself up the Mississippi River,” Martine said.

  That was news to everyone else, but Martine never seemed to lie or make jokes, so Archie figured it must be true.

  “And what about me?” Archie asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “You go after Moffett. Somebody has to,” Clyde said, “and you’re the only one of us who can stand up to her on your own. Heck, you’re the only one who can stand up to anything on your own.”

  “How do you know she’s the one going east?” Fergus asked.

  “Because it’s always been east for her,” Hachi said. “Ever since she got the Dragon Lantern. She wants only one thing in this world: revenge. And she’s not going to do anything that would slow her down. Trust me. I know.”

  “Then it’s settled. Archie will head up east after Moffett and her monster army,” Clyde said.

  “I don’t like it,” Hachi said.

  “What part?”

  “The part about Archie being on his own,” Hachi said.

  Archie looked away in embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry, Archie. But you know why it’s not good for you to be alone. I think everybody here does.”

  “I do not understand,” Martine said.

  “When he gets mad, he loses control, and when he loses control, he hurts people,” Hachi told her.

  “Not all the time!” Archie said.

  “Only, you know, when you knocked me into a rock wall and attacked me and Fergus with a big metal pole,” Hachi said.

  “I had just found out I wasn’t human! That my parents weren’t really my parents! I was dealing with a lot of stuff!”

  “Or the time you went crazy and started punching the Moving City of Cheyenne?” Clyde asked.

  “And zoned out inside the Hippocamp?” Señor X said.

  “The Mangleborn got inside my head!”

  “Or the time you destroyed half of Alcatraz and let Moffett kill Sings-In-The-Night,” Kitsune said.

  “That was—I had Moffett and a Mangleborn messing with me that time,” Archie said quietly. Watching Moffett kill Sings-In-The-Night, not being able to stop it from happening, was his biggest regret in life, after how he’d been born. It was an image that would haunt him to his dying day—whenever that was.

  “I’m not going to get mad and lose control again,” Archie said, trying to sound calm. “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Right,” said Señor X from Gonzalo’s holster. “And I’ve given up shooting people.”

  “I want to go back to the part about you not being human,” Gonzalo said.

  “I’ve got a handle on it!” Archie yelled.

  Kitsune took a step back, and Gonzalo put a hand to his raygun.

  Archie closed his eyes. “I’ve got a handle on it,” he said more calmly.

  “This is exactly what I’m talking about,” Hachi said. “You’re an overheated boiler when you’re not fighting monsters.”

  “I shall go with him,” Mr. Rivets said. “Master Archie has been in my care since shortly after he was born. I’m sure I can manage him.”

  Archie burned inside. Manage him? He was twelve years old! He didn’t need a babysitter.

  “I still don’t like it,” Hachi said. She took a deep breath. “But I don’t see as we have any other choice.”

  “Okay then,” Clyde said. “Everybody knows what they have to do. Find your pair of Shadow Leaguers and take ’em down, dynamo or no dynamo.”

  “Moffett’s got that lektric dynamo, I just know it,” Hachi muttered.

  “How are we going to know when and where to meet back up?” Gonzalo asked.

  “We can just talk to each other on the shells,” Martine said.

  Everyone looked at her again. “The shells?” Fergus asked.

  “I told you about them when I gave them to you,” Martine said. She tilted her head. “Unless I only imagined we had that conversation. I sometimes do that.”

  “I think this is one you only imagined,” said Clyde.

  “I wonder
ed why nobody was using them but me,” Martine said. She fished in her pouch and brought out a handful of tiny seashells.

  Fergus’s tattoos rearranged themselves as he cautiously stuck one in his ear.

  “What do we do with these, put them to our ears and listen to the ocean?” Kitsune said.

  “No. You touch your finger to it and talk, like this,” Martine said, “and everyone else can hear you.”

  “Gah!” Fergus said, pulling his out quickly. “It sounded like you were inside my head!”

  The others put the shells in their ears and tried it. Archie and Hachi shared a frightened look—it was very much like hearing a Mangleborn inside your head.

  “How does it work? How do you even power something this small?” Fergus said. He pushed his around in his palm, examining it with a magnifying glass from his sporran.

  “Aether,” Martine said.

  “Right,” Fergus said. “Because you understand Mangleborn math.”

  “What’s the range on these?” Clyde asked.

  “There is no limit,” Martine told them. “At least not that I have discovered.”

  “Okay then,” Clyde said. “So now we can stay in touch. We’ll let each other know when we’re finished, and pick a place to meet up after that. Everybody good?”

  There were nods all round.

  “Then let’s do it,” Clyde said. “Like Mrs. DeMarcus says, ‘There’s no better time than the present.’ We can’t let another Mangleborn get free.”

  Hachi pulled Fergus aside before the tinker joined Clyde in the giant steam man. Archie thought it was so they could say good-bye in private, maybe even kiss, but whatever Hachi said to Fergus made him mad. He looked over his shoulder at Archie, and Archie quickly looked away. He didn’t want them to know he’d been spying.

  “Come, Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said. “I have an idea how we can pursue Mrs. Moffett sub rosa, as it were.”

  16

  A nervous young Septemberist agent met Gonzalo and Kitsune at the docks by the Clark Street Bridge in Shikaakwa. Martine’s submarine had brought them up the Mississippi River, across the ancient Shikaakwa Portage Canal, and up the Shikaakwa River in just a few days, but Moffett’s Shadow Leaguers had apparently already beaten them to the city. Shikaakwans were piling into boats with whatever they could carry and pushing away downriver.

  “Thank goodness you’re here!” the Septemberist said. He was a young, athletic Yankee in a gray suit and tie. “They’re running roughshod over the whole city. Two of them. Monsters. Er, Manglespawn. Half the buildings in downtown have up and left the Loop and run north across the river or south to Hide Park, where they always go whenever there’s trouble. Everybody who can’t afford to pack up shop and move is panicking.”

  Gonzalo walked on, Alamo at his heels, but the Septemberist stood by the submarine, waiting for more people to come out.

  “It’s—it’s just you? Where are the others? I thought the whole League was coming!” the young Septemberist said. He couldn’t see Kitsune, though she walked along right beside Gonzalo. They had both agreed she should make herself invisible until they figured out what they were up against.

  “One riot, one Ranger,” Gonzalo told him. “Everything’s going to be fine. First things first: Thirty days hath September.”

  “Oh. Oh yes!” the Septemberist said. “Um, seven heroes we remember!”

  Gonzalo nodded. “What’s your name?”

  “Oh. Albert Spalding! I—I play lacrosse for the Shikaakwa Cubs.”

  Gonzalo turned his blindfolded eyes toward Spalding. “Sorry. I don’t watch lacrosse.”

  “Right. No,” Spalding said. “It’s okay. I—I just took over for the Septemberist agent who’d been here before. Something about a bug? On the back of his neck?”

  “Let’s just focus on the here and now,” Gonzalo told him. More Illini people ran past, trying to escape to the lake. “What’s that rumbling?” Gonzalo asked. He could feel it beneath his feet, like a slow, steady earthquake.

  “It’s the buildings,” Señor X told him. “Gonzalo, the buildings—they’re moving.”

  Señor X and Kitsune watched as a hardware store trundled across the Clark Street Bridge, heading north. The entire building was raised up off the ground by five or six feet, and rode upon heavy steel rails. Black smoke poured from its chimney as its thundering steam engine drove it away from downtown.

  The hardware store was followed by a towering, seven-story hotel called the Palmer House, also making its way north. A hotel guest watched them out the window of her third-story window.

  “Yare yare,” Kitsune muttered.

  “Who—who said that?” Spalding said, looking around for the voices of Señor X and Kitsune.

  “My horse,” Gonzalo told him.

  “Howdy,” Alamo said.

  Albert Spalding was speechless.

  “Why are the buildings moving?” Gonzalo asked.

  “They uh, they move all the time. Shikaakwa’s just about the same level as Lake Michigan, so water doesn’t drain away. The streets were always turning to muck, so they lifted all the buildings up with hydraulics to put in sewage pipes. Turns out everybody liked being able to raise and lower their buildings, so they left the hydraulics. Then people wanted to move their houses from neighborhood to neighborhood, so they built rails all over. The whole city’s on a raised grid. Any building can move anywhere else in the city any time it wants to—as long as there’s room, and they’ve got the money to move.”

  A Cathay restaurant chugged by, headed west. Diners sat at tables eating fried rice and watching the city roll by.

  “Well, if that don’t beat all,” Alamo said.

  A powerful gust of wind hit Gonzalo in the face, spinning him around. He tried to steady himself, but the wind changed direction and knocked him sideways, almost like it was deliberately messing with him. He held his hat and stood his ground. Beside him, the wind pushed Kitsune into Alamo.

  “Strong wind,” Gonzalo said. “That from all the buildings moving around?”

  “Er, no. That’s just regular old Shikaakwa,” Spalding said. “They don’t call us the Windy City for nothing. Plays havoc with long balls on the lacrosse field.”

  “It’s more than that,” Señor X said. “G-man, I’ve been here before. A long, long time ago. That wind? It’s a remnant of an air elemental Mangleborn the Atlantean League defeated. Wuchowsen. The Wind Eagle. They couldn’t kill it, of course, but they could disperse it. Scatter it. It’s still here, still alive, still mean, but just … broken up.”

  “And who—who was that?” Spalding asked.

  “My raygun,” Gonzalo said.

  Spalding looked more confused than ever.

  “Gonzalo, if those Shadow Leaguers did bring the lektric dynamo here, they could put Wuchowsen together again,” Señor X told him. “They do that, and all these buildings are going to be doing a lot more moving, just not in any direction they want to go.”

  “All right,” Gonzalo said. “Where are they?”

  Ka-THOOM. A boiler exploded somewhere just south of them, and over the moving rooftops Kitsune and Spalding saw the twenty-story Sears and Roe Buck Building rock and tilt sideways.

  “There, I think,” said Señor X.

  Gonzalo mounted Alamo, and Kitsune hopped up behind him. “Tell people to stay out of the way!” he told Spalding. “Giddyup!”

  Alamo dodged a fleeing grocery store, a flower shop, and a saloon, all of which were steaming as quickly as they could away from downtown. Drinkers hung off the saloon, laughing and singing, and more Shikaakwans hopped on board as it passed. The steamhorse pulled to a stop at the edge of Brant Park, across the street from the leaning Sears and Roe Buck Building. People crowded the lobby and leaned out the windows, looking for some way to escape. The skyscraper had been knocked off its tracks by a gleaming crystal man with a lamppost in his hands.

  “Leaning Oak,” Señor X said.

  “Arrested in 1862 for gambling, graft, ex
tortion, and murder,” Gonzalo said.

  “And turned into a crystalline monster in 1876 by Philomena Moffett,” Kitsune said.

  Leaning Oak still had a human-shaped body, but it was entirely clear crystal, like ice, or diamond. His shoulders were big and hunched, and out of his back grew spiky crystal shards, like the floor of a diamond mine. Señor X described him to Gonzalo.

  “This city is mine, ya hear me? Mine!” Leaning Oak roared.

  ZaPOW! Gonzalo shot the lamppost out of Leaning Oak’s hands.

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” Gonzalo told him.

  Leaning Oak picked up a steambuggy. “You don’t!” he yelled, hurling it at Gonzalo.

  Alamo galloped out of the way.

  “Keep him busy while I get the rest of the people out of that building!” Kitsune whispered, and she was gone.

  “Not a problem,” Gonzalo said. He took aim and shot the crystal man right in the chest.

  Ka-POW! Señor X’s yellow beam hit Leaning Oak and refracted, like light hitting a prism. Shing! Shing-shing-shing-shing! Yellow beams shot out from him in all directions, taking out trees, Sears and Roe Buck windows, and a pneumatic post office tube. Ka-POW! One of the beams shot back and hit Alamo, and the steamhorse reared back and fell.

  “Alamo! Alamo, are you all right?” Gonzalo asked.

  “I’ll be okay, boss,” Alamo said. The steamhorse tried one of his bent legs, but it wouldn’t move. “I think I’m out of this rodeo though.”

  “My ray refracted, G-man,” Señor X said. “You can’t shoot him again—it’s too dangerous.”

  Leaning Oak laughed and came lumbering after Gonzalo. “Not so hot when you can’t shoot me with your raygun, are you, Ranger?” the crystal man said. He raised a big crystal paw to smash Gonzalo where he lay, but suddenly he took a step back and swung wildly at the empty air.

  “Get away from me! Get away from me, you freaks!” he cried.

  “What—?” Gonzalo asked.

  “It’s the fox-girl,” Señor X said. “She’s making him see something that isn’t there.”

  Kitsune grabbed Gonzalo under the arms and pulled him out from under Alamo. He hadn’t even heard her sneak back.

  “Bat men,” said Kitsune. “Want to see them?”