The League of Seven

by Alan Gratz

  “Who is that?” Tesla asked. “Who’s talking? How do you know so much about lektricity?”

  “Let us in and we’ll tell you,” Hachi said.

  “No. No tricks!” Tesla said. “I don’t care. I don’t. I’m going away now. I’m not listening to you anymore. La la la la la la la la.”

  “He probably has his fingers in his ears,” Hachi said.

  “I heard that!” Tesla said.

  “I thought you said you weren’t listening anymore,” Hachi told him.

  “La la la la la la la la,” Tesla said again.

  Hachi flung her dagger at the door in frustration, and it lodged there with a twang.

  “That’s helpful,” Archie said.

  “Just letting off steam,” she told him, and she went to retrieve her knife.

  “Nae, wait!” Fergus said, reaching for her. “Don’t touch that! If it penetrated the outer wall, it could—”

  A white-hot bolt of lektricity leaped from the dagger to Fergus’ outstretched hand. Kazaaak! But Fergus wasn’t jolted or thrown across the room. Archie and Hachi stepped back in fear as lightning arced from the dagger to his hand in a constant stream. All over Fergus’ skin, the black lines danced and rearranged themselves.

  “Fergus, what—?” Archie asked.

  “I—I don’t know,” Fergus said. His startled face glowed in the lektric light. “But keep back. I should be dead. This should be killing me, but I don’t even feel it.”

  Lektricity surged between the dagger and Fergus’ outstretched hand, more and more of it, until the humming sound outside the room died and the sparks stopped coming. Fergus staggered back and stared at his hand. The black lines on his skin were moving again, rearranging themselves.

  “Your face and arms,” Archie told him. “The lines are moving there too.”

  The door to the inside of the facility kachunked, and a tall, thin man with a metal cage on his head ran out. He wore oversized rubber gloves and rubber boots, and metal foil stuck out of his sleeves and pant legs like he was wearing tin long johns.

  “How did you do that?” Tesla demanded, his curiosity apparently overcoming his paranoia. “That was one hundred milliamperes! Where did it go? You should be dead!”

  “I know. I think I—I think I absorbed it,” Fergus said. He tapped the ends of his thumb and forefinger together, and lektricity sparked between them.

  “O Bozye!” Tesla muttered. He took a screwdriver out of his pocket and touched it to Fergus’ skin, but nothing happened. “No discharge! You’re nonconductive now. Come with me.”

  Before any of them could protest, Tesla grabbed Fergus and pulled him inside. Tesla forgot he was wearing a cage on his head and banged into the door frame. He cursed in some Old World language and turned to them, embarrassed. “To keep the voices out of my head,” he whispered, tapping the cage. “So they can’t control me.”

  Archie might have thought Tesla was crazy if he hadn’t heard voices in his head himself. The voice of a Mangleborn. JANDAL A HAAD, the Swarm Queen had said. Like she was speaking just to him. Like she was … calling his name.

  Archie shook off the memory. Hachi was tapping at her dagger, seeing if it was going erupt in lightning again. It didn’t, and she plucked it from the wall and followed Archie into Atlantis.

  16

  Archie, Hachi, and Mr. Rivets followed Tesla and Fergus through a short concrete corridor into a chamber so vast they slowed down to marvel at it. The curved ceiling must have been eight stories tall—nearly as high as the river above. Catwalks circled the walls, leading off to smaller corridors cut into the bedrock. Suspended from a spider’s web of steel frames three stories up was a series of chains and pulleys, meant, no doubt, to service the seven massive machines scattered around the cavern floor. They were giant, humpbacked things, like ten-foot-tall metal turtle shells, connected by a jumble of tubes, wires, and conduits.

  “Hydro-lektrics,” Fergus said.

  Tesla stopped when he realized Fergus wasn’t following him. “What? Oh, yes. Built by the Atlanteans to run off the water from the falls. You know all about the Atlanteans, I take it? Geniuses. The marvels they created! By my conservative calculations, this facility can generate close to two thousand megawatts. Now, if you’ll follow me. Just down here,” he said, climbing down a ladder.

  “Two thousand megawatts,” Fergus said reverently.

  “What does that mean?” Hachi asked.

  “With Edison’s lektric lights, two thousand megawatts could light up an entire city. Maybe the whole Eastern Seaboard.”

  “Or raise a Mangleborn,” Archie said.

  They followed Tesla down the ladder into a room set into the floor. It was filled with workbenches and shelves covered with metal parts, wires, and tools, but the rounded walls and the drain in the floor reminded Archie of a big, empty pool—which, it turns out, was exactly what it was.

  “A repurposed water tank,” explained a machine man who helped them down off the ladder. He was a silver-gray color, not brass like Mr. Rivets, and white smoke puffed from his stovepipe hat. The nameplate welded to his chest said his name was Mr. Piston. He was one of a small army of silver-gray Tik Toks working at various tasks around the facility.

  “The pools were previously used in the operation of the hydro-lektric generators,” Mr. Piston said, “but Mr. Tesla drained a few to use as extra workshop space, as most of the generators are not online.”

  “Most of them aren’t online?” Archie asked. “Does that mean some of them are?”

  “He had to lektric that Franklin cage somehow,” Fergus said.

  Tesla looked up from a shelf of equipment like a child caught with his hand in the licorice jar. “Oh. Well. I do keep one of them online. For security reasons, you understand. And perhaps the odd experiment…”

  “Mr. Tesla!” Archie scolded.

  Tesla waved a hand. “It’s all right, it’s all right. I know what I’m doing.” A metal box with wires sticking out of it fell off a shelf and crashed to the floor. Tesla kicked it aside and kept digging through the machinery.

  “Does anybody else hear that?” Fergus said, frowning. He looked around the room.

  “Hear what?” Archie asked.

  “A … beeping. A lektrical sound. Beep beep beep beep. It won’t stop.”

  Hachi shook her head. She couldn’t hear anything strange either.

  A cockroach scurried out of the drain and stopped like it was spying on them. Archie stepped on it, just in case it really was.

  “I must say, it’s nice to have you back at Atlantis Station, Master Archie,” Mr. Piston said.

  “You remember me?” Archie asked

  “Of course, sir. You were very young then, but machine men never forget. Have your parents come to do research in the archives again?”

  “No. My parents have been captured. By a Mangleborn. That’s what we’re here for, Mr. Tesla. We need your help!”

  “And rayguns,” Hachi said. “Big ones.”

  “Yes!” Tesla said. He thumped something big and heavy down on a workbench and put Fergus’ hands on the two poles sticking out of the top.

  “What is it?” Fergus asked.

  “A hundred-volt battery,” Tesla said.

  Fergus jumped back, lektricity arcing between his hands and the battery poles.

  “Crivens! That could have shocked the clinker out of me!”

  “But it didn’t,” Tesla said, his eyes alight with excitement. He took Fergus’ hands in his own and turned them over. “Yes! Circuits, I think.”

  “What?” Fergus asked.

  “These marks on your skin. They are forming circuits. Circuits that change and adapt as needed.”

  “Of course,” Fergus said. He gaped at his hands while Tesla sifted through another box, looking for something.

  “What does that mean?” Archie asked. “What’s a circuit?”

  “Circuits are what made the Archimedes Engine work. It’s like little paths that make lektric current do wha
t you want it to do,” Fergus said.

  “Unlike aether, we know quite a lot about lektricity,” Tesla explained. “The aether operates with a strange geometry that no human mind has been able to comprehend. All we’ve been able to do with it for the last two millennia is make crude weapons that collect it and discharge it through crystals. But lektricity—lektricity is measurable. Serviceable. Understandable! Lektricity conforms to quantifiable mathematics! The Romans, the Atlanteans, the Lemurians, the Mu—perhaps even the First Men—they all discovered the secrets of advanced circuitry, building fantastic computational engines that could fit in the palm of your hand!”

  “That’s what Edison did,” Fergus said. “He turned me into a lektrical computational engine. I’m a human computer.”

  “Edison?” Tesla said. “I worked for that madman once.” Tesla grabbed Fergus’ arms, the metal foil under his suit crinkling. “Now, we are sworn enemies! Tesla and Edison! I am his nemesis, and he is mine! Although I’m not actually sure he knows I exist. Do you work for him?”

  “I—I did. But not anymore. He did this to me,” Fergus said.

  Tesla nodded and calmed down, watching Fergus’ tattoos shift and change. “How do you do it? How do you change the circuits?”

  “I don’t. I mean, I don’t think about it at all. It just happens.”

  “Can you reverse the flow, I wonder? Discharge lektricity at the rate you absorb it? Here—” Tesla went rummaging again.

  Fergus put his hands to his head. “Ach. Are you sure none of the rest of you can hear that infernal beeping? It doesn’t stop.”

  Hachi gave Archie a “get on with it” look.

  “Mr. Tesla, I’m sure Fergus wants to know everything that’s happened to him,” Archie said, “but there is a Mangleborn rising in Florida. Malacar Ahasherat. The Swarm Queen. There may be more of them rising in other places too. We fought a Manglespawn in the tunnels beneath New Rome.”

  “Aha!” Tesla said. He came up from a box with a glass bulb with wires coiled inside it. “You know what this is?” he asked Fergus.

  “One of Edison’s lektric lightbulbs!”

  “Well, no. This is Atlantean. But I’m sure it’s the same principle.” He handed it to Fergus. “Make it glow.”

  “How?”

  Tesla shrugged. “Think it. You know the principles. Imagine it working.”

  Fergus closed his eyes and concentrated. The lines on his skin reconfigured, and in moments the glass bulb began to glow. Archie gasped, and Fergus opened his eyes.

  “I did it!” Fergus said.

  The lightbulb glowed brighter and brighter until it exploded in a shower of glass, making them all duck.

  “Yes. Well, I think it will take some measure of control,” Tesla said. “But we can test your capacity.”

  “Archie,” Fergus said. “The Archimedes Engine. The tower you destroyed. Edison made me into one. That’s why he’s after me. He wants to use me to raise that Mangleborn.”

  Tesla looked up from a crate. “Edison is trying to raise a Mangleborn? Which one?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Archie said. He was losing his patience. “Malacar Ahasherat. The Swarm Queen. She has my parents!”

  As Archie said it, he had another vision of them. A waking dream. He was standing in the middle of a great machine. Gears the size of boulders rotated and clinked around him. And there were his parents, slipping down between two of the gears. They would be crushed! He ran for them, screaming their names, when suddenly the vision disappeared and he was jerked back into Atlantis Station. Tesla was staring at him up close through the wire cage around his head.

  “You heard something, didn’t you? Saw something?” Tesla said.

  There was something on Archie’s head. He put a hand up to it, but Tesla stopped him.

  “Ah ah ah. Don’t take that off. It’s to keep the voices out.”

  Archie looked around. Fergus was wearing a metal hat like a big bowl with wires coming out of it, and blinking like he’d just woken up. So was Hachi. Archie assumed he was wearing the same thing.

  “You all went quiet for a time,” Mr. Rivets said. “You couldn’t hear us or see us either. Not until Mr. Tesla put those devices on your heads.”

  “Wait, you saw it too?” Archie asked Hachi. “Have you been seeing the same things we have this whole time?”

  Hachi nodded reluctantly.

  “You didn’t say anything. You said you didn’t believe me when I told you my parents were still alive, but you saw them.”

  “But how?” Mr. Rivets asked. “Miss Hachi did not touch the green flame.”

  Hachi looked away. Either she couldn’t explain it, or didn’t want to.

  More secrets, Archie thought. He was getting slagging tired of all the secrets.

  “Crivens. I wish these tinfoil hats blocked that beeping noise,” said Fergus. “You sure none of you lot can hear it?”

  Tesla tutted. “This is more serious than I thought. Edison raising a Mangleborn. Why didn’t you say so? If he does, he could remake the world with lektricity. Which, frankly, would be fascinating.”

  “And kill us all,” Archie said.

  “Yes. That too,” Tesla said. “Mr. Piston—show them to the archives on the fifth floor. That’s where you’ll find anything the Septemberists have on this Mangleborn.” He waved a hand. “I don’t know anything about that. The Society just stores the books here for safekeeping.”

  Mr. Piston nodded and invited them to climb the ladder with him.

  “We need weapons too,” Hachi said. “Big ones.”

  “That I can do,” Tesla said. “Run along, and I’ll have something for you when you come back. Ah ah ah. Not you,” he told Fergus. “You can stay and help. And if we have a bit of extra time, I want to try hooking you up to a few things.”

  “Fine,” Fergus told him. “As long as you do something about that bloody beeping.”

  17

  Archie stared at Hachi as they rode the elevator to the fifth-floor archives. Why hadn’t she said something about having the same dream he and Fergus had on the Hesperus? That must have been why she was awake—not because they were talking, but because she’d had the same nightmare. She had seen his parents. And back in the glade too, she must have had the same vision of his parents in the brass room with the empty picture frames. Why had she told him his parents were dead if she’d seen them alive? And where had she made her connection with the Swarm Queen, if it wasn’t through the green flame that had connected Fergus to the Mangleborn?

  And for that matter, where had Archie gotten his connection?

  “Would you care for some music while you wait?” Mr. Piston asked. A gentle music-box version of “Mr. Twister, the Melancholy Machine Man” tinkled mechanically from somewhere inside his body.

  “You can play music without a Concert card?” Archie asked.

  “It is just one of the many standard features of the new and improved Emartha Mark IV Machine Man, sir. Each of us comes standard with aluminum memory cards, titanium alloy bodies, and a compact coal stove and boiler which provide a great deal more torque and a longer run-time than the clockwork mainspring which powers the Mark II.”

  Mr. Rivets straightened and whirred almost indignantly. He was a Mark II Machine Man.

  “We’re very happy with our Mark II,” said Archie.

  “Thank you, sir,” Mr. Rivets said.

  “Customer loyalty is a hallmark of the Emartha Locomotive and Machine Man Company,” Mr. Piston said. The elevator came to a stop, and he slid open its cage. “That is why so many owners choose to replace their obsolete machine men with newer models from the same foundry.”

  Mr. Rivets waited for everyone else to leave the elevator before following a few steps behind.

  The League’s archives were in another long, tall corridor, though not nearly as long and as tall as the one below with the lektric generators. The room had been converted to a library decades ago, but despite the dedicated upkee
p from half a dozen machine men—all Mark IVs, Archie noted with disappointment on Mr. Rivets’ behalf—the place still smelled ancient and dusty.

  “I think I remember this place,” Archie said. “I remember playing hide-and-seek with Mr. Rivets in the shelves while Mom and Dad looked things up in books.”

  “Just so, sir,” Mr. Piston said.

  Archie had never shared his parents’ love of libraries. Just the sight of the stacks and the thousands of books cataloged here made him sag. If this was anything like the library back in Philadelphia, there would be books in here as old as Ancient Greece. A few might even hold secrets from old Atlantis. All they needed was for one or two to be about Malacar Ahasherat—to tell them how to stop her and get his parents back. But the thought of wading through all these books looking for answers made him tired already.

  Mr. Piston brought them a stack of decomposing old tomes, and Archie and Hachi got to work, skimming through them for any reference they could find to the Swarm Queen. There were accounts of all manner of Mangleborn and Manglespawn, from giants with antlers the size of trees to lesser creatures with feathered arms and bodies like snakes.

  “I can’t believe all these things are real,” Hachi said, shutting a book.

  Archie turned the next page of his book and froze. There in an illustration was Malacar Ahasherat, the Swarm Queen, fighting a hulking First Nations man wrapped in a bearskin.

  “I found her,” Archie said, and Hachi came around to read with him.

  The man in the picture was the Great Bear, a member of some former League of Seven, one of the superheroes who had come together to save their world from the Mangleborn once again. He had been a mighty champion of the Mi’kmaq, a First Nations tribe in Acadia.

  “‘After six did fall in battle, only the Great Bear, his pelt impervious to every weapon, remained,’” Hachi read aloud. “‘Thence it was that the Great Bear alone, he with the strength of a hundred men, came to defeat the Queen of Swarms, the last of the ancient monsters called the Mangleborn.’ But it doesn’t say how,” Hachi said. She flipped forward and back in the book, looking for answers.