The League of Seven

by Alan Gratz

  Fergus was still staring at the inky lines on his hand when Archie and Hachi climbed back into the conning tower.

  “I barely had to think about it, and I just—boom.” he said.

  Across the gulf between the airships, Archie saw Edison ordering more men over to the Hesperus. Fergus’ old boss stood on the top deck of his airship, just below the great rigid envelope of the Black Maria, his black hair and black suit whipping in the wind. Goons hurried around the deck putting on harnesses, handing out oscillating rifles and lektric prods, and cranking up the platform with the lektric cannon. Edison stood still and calm among them, his eyes focused completely on Fergus.

  “Oh, crivens,” Fergus said. “He’s seen what I can do now.”

  “There’s more coming!” Archie said. Three more of Edison’s men were zipping down the lines that connected the Black Maria to the Hesperus. He clipped his safety line to the rail, braced his feet, and took aim at the grappling hooks with his aether pistol. Bwaaat. Bwaat. Bwaat. He didn’t go flying this time, but he didn’t come close to hitting the ropes either. Two of his shots went beaming harmlessly into the sky. The third hit the Hesperus, knocking off a piece of the outer hull.

  Hachi pulled Archie’s raygun away. “Stop,” she told him. She hefted her wave cannon into Fergus’ arms and jumped over the rail. Hachi slid down to where the grappling hooks had punched into the Hesperus’ hull and pulled out her dagger. Snik-snik-snik—she cut the ropes that linked the two airships, and the men on the lines fell screaming and flailing into the clouds.

  “Maybe we should just make some popcorn and watch,” Fergus said.

  Poom. One of the gas airbags above them exploded in a fireball. The floor beneath Archie and Fergus dropped, and the Hesperus lurched. Edison’s men were shooting at the airbags that kept the Hesperus aloft.

  “I thought they wanted me alive!” Fergus yelled.

  Hachi climbed back into the conning tower and took the wave cannon from Fergus. “They’re just trying to bring us down. They won’t shoot all of them.”

  Poom. Another gasbag exploded, and Archie felt the searing heat on his skin. He grabbed the railing of the Hesperus as they listed and dropped again.

  “Give us the lektric boy,” Edison called through a speaking trumpet, “and we will let the rest of you go in peace.”

  Hachi put a hand to Fergus’ chest. “We won’t let you turn yourself in to save us.”

  “I wasn’t offering!” said Fergus.

  Another oscillator ray crackled past the gasbags above.

  “The pelt!” Archie said. “The Great Bear’s pelt! We can use it protect the gasbags!”

  “Go,” Hachi told him. “I’ll cover you.” She leveled her massive wave cannon at the deck of the Black Maria. Wom-wom-wom-wom-wom. The wave pulse rippled the deck, popping rivets and tearing the metal sheathing away. Goons went spilling over the sides of the airship.

  Archie climbed into the Hesperus’ rigging and tried to fluff the pelt out to cover as many of the gasbags as he could. The wind kept catching it and making the end flutter.

  On the prow of the Black Maria, a goon brought Edison’s lektric cannon to bear on the Hesperus.

  “If he shoots that thing, it’s all over!” Fergus yelled. She nodded and shifted her aim to the man in the cannon’s command chair. Wom-wom-wom-wom-wom. When the debris cleared there was an empty spot where the operator and his chair used to be.

  “Remind me never to get on your bad side,” Fergus said.

  A goon on Edison’s ship leveled his raygun at the Hesperus’ balloons and fired. Poom. Another gasbag exploded beside Archie, and he and the pelt went flying.

  “Archie!” Hachi cried.

  The safety rope connecting Archie to the conning tower rail caught him, and he slammed into the hull of the Hesperus. Dazed, Archie looked back up the length of the rope and saw a tear in it popping and uncoiling. If the rope split, he would slide off the edge. He grabbed frantically at the smooth, sloped surface of the airship with one hand, his other hand clutching the white pelt that flapped in the emptiness below the airship.

  Don’t fall off, he told himself. Don’t fall don’t fall don’t fall—

  Hachi jumped over the rail of the conning tower headfirst and slid toward him. Her safety rope jerked tight just close enough for her to grab Archie’s hand.

  “Circus! Showtime!” she cried. Her clockwork menagerie scuttled out from under her and took flight, fighting the wind. “Grab him! Don’t let go!”

  Four little brass creatures grabbed Archie—his shirt, his arm, his hair, anywhere they could—and pulled for all they were worth.

  Archie’s legs swung like pendulums over the side. “If I can just get my feet up. Just—” His free hand squelched on the slick metal hull as he tried to gain purchase.

  “Let go of the pelt!” Hachi said. “Use both hands!”

  “No! I’ve almost got it. Almost—” His foot caught the edge. Yes! Now if he could just get his other leg up over the side—

  Archie felt it more than heard it. Pop! The safety line snapped. His foot swung off the edge, and his hand slipped from Hachi’s fingers. Archie’s stomach leaped into his throat, and he dropped over the side.

  “Hachiiiii!” Archie cried, and he was gone.

  21

  Fergus couldn’t believe his eyes. Archie had just fallen over the side of the Hesperus.

  “Archieeeeeee!” Hachi cried. Her clockwork animals fluttered up around her, but Archie was well and truly gone.

  When the shock wore off, Fergus hurried to the other side of the conning tower rail to look down. Archie had to be okay. He had to have grabbed onto the mooring anchor. A landing strut. An open porthole. Anything.

  But no. Fergus felt his good leg go weak as he watched Archie and the white pelt tumble through the air, down and down and down, five thousand feet or more. He hit the ground with a poof of dust and was still.

  Fergus slumped against the rail. He had done this. Fergus was the reason Edison had come after them, and now Archie was—Archie was—

  Hachi climbed over the conn tower rail, looking frantic.

  “A longer rope!” she yelled. “I need a longer rope. I have to go underneath and see if—”

  Fergus shook his head. “I saw him fall. He’s gone.”

  Hachi slumped to her knees.

  KSSSSH-KSSSSH-KSSSSH-KISSSH. Edison’s repaired lightning cannon shot lektricity across the sky at them. It arced to the metal Hesperus, blasting hull panels away and lektrifying everything metal. Fergus didn’t feel a thing, but Hachi arched and lurched as the volts coursed through her.

  “Nae. Nae!” Fergus screamed. With every drop of black blood in his body he willed the lektricity away from the ship and into him, turning himself into a human lightning rod. Light as bright as the sun lit him up as the lektric arc shifted from the hull to his body, lashing like a snake with its fangs dug into his skin. Hachi, released from the lektricity’s grip but now unconscious, slid down through the hatch into the Hesperus.

  Edison switched off the lektric cannon, and Fergus slumped against the rail, exhausted. Lektricity crackled in his hair and between his fingers like the physical manifestation of his anger. He hauled himself to his feet and thrust his hands out at the Black Maria, channeling all the fury inside him. Lightning leaped from his fingers and arced back to Edison’s ship. The blast wrenched aluminum hull plates off the ship, ripping it like a can opener. The lektricity bucked and kicked, but Fergus wrestled it under control, roaring like thunder. The Black Maria tore along its seams, and the lightning jumped to the rigid metal envelope, touching off the gasbags inside. Boom! The Black Maria burst into flames and careened toward the Hesperus.

  Once he was going it was hard to stop, but Fergus pulled the lightning back inside as the ships collided. Crash! The flaming Black Maria struck the Hesperus, knocking Fergus off his feet. He tumbled down the side of the Hesperus just like Archie had before, but Fergus caught a towrope on the Black Maria and saved h
imself. The ships ground against each other, dragging each other down, then pulled away. Fergus tried to hook his good leg into the rail of the Hesperus as the ships separated, but he couldn’t reach it. Clinging to the towrope, he watched in dismay as the Hesperus drifted away and the flaming Black Maria above him plummeted toward the earth.

  * * *

  Whoever was at the helm of Edison’s doomed ship stayed there long enough to steer the Black Maria for a broad lake surrounded by a forest, but soon escape gliders dropped from the sides of the dirigible. Was Edison on one of those gliders, or had Fergus taken him out with his lektric blast? With Fergus’ luck, Edison had already escaped and would be waiting for him on the ground.

  If he made it to the ground. His arms were already aching from hanging on. Fergus wrapped his wrist up in the rope. It burned and ripped his skin, but at least he wouldn’t fall.

  Not like Archie.

  Another explosion rocked the Black Maria’s gas envelope and the airship broke in half. Fergus fell, slamming into the lake and inhaling a lungful of water. The flaming airship hit just after him, pushing him farther down into the murky depths. He spun end over end, half-drowned and disoriented. He didn’t even know which way was up. Fergus thrashed around, instinctively holding on to what little breath he had left, and wriggled himself away from the sinking airship.

  Fergus kicked with his one good leg, fighting against the weight of the brace on his bad leg. At last he broke the surface, coughing and spluttering. The Black Maria’s cracked envelope sat half-in, half-out of the water nearby, smoking and gurgling as it sank. Debris bobbed to the surface all around Fergus: cushions, pieces of furniture, bottles, clothes, lab equipment. People too—some alive and gasping like him, others already dead, floating up like driftwood.

  A large glass jar bobbed to the surface, and Fergus grabbed hold of it to help him stay afloat. But there was something thumping around inside it. Something pinkish gray and squishy.

  It was a human brain.

  “Gah!” Fergus cried, letting the jar go. He immediately sank, his metal leg brace dragging him down, and had to grab the jar again not to drown. He held the jar as far away from himself as he could and kicked his way toward the shore.

  Fergus dragged himself up onto a dock, letting the brain in the jar float away. He was waterlogged and sore, and he took a few minutes to catch his breath and watch the Black Maria sink into the blue depths of the lake. As tired as he was, he knew he couldn’t stay put for long. There were railroad tracks in the distance, which meant there would be a train eventually. That was his best chance at escape.

  “Hey—hey you!” someone called from the water. “Help!”

  It was one of Edison’s lackeys. Fergus didn’t know him, but he knew the type—hired muscle Edison kept around to do his dirty work. The man clung to a piece of lumber and looked to be as bad a swimmer as Fergus was, splashing around and breathing in big gulps of lake water. Fergus ratcheted his leg to a kneeling position and bent down to help drag the man up out of the water.

  They flopped beside each other on the dock, panting and dripping.

  “Thanks,” the man said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Fergus said.

  The man nodded at Fergus’ kilt. “You … you that boy Edison’s after?”

  “Me? Nae,” Fergus lied. “I—”

  The man pulled an aether pistol from his pocket aimed it at him.

  “Seriously?” Fergus said. “Seriously? I pull you out of the water, save you from drowning, and this is the thanks I get?” Fergus sat up. The man squeezed his trigger.

  Fizzt. The raygun shorted out, either from the water or the fall. The dark lines on Fergus’ face rearranged to match his scowl. He raised a hand at the goon and thought boom.

  Fizzt. Tiny sparks fizzled from Fergus’ hand, but that was it. No lightning. No arcing lektricity. He had shorted out too. Lektricity and water was never a good combination.

  The man hurried to get up, but Fergus was quicker. He grabbed the board the man had clung to in the water and smacked him upside the head with it. Thwack! The goon went flailing back into the lake.

  Fergus threw the board at him, mostly for the satisfying thunk it made on his head when it hit him. “You can get out of there yourself this time, ingrate.”

  A steam whistle blew in the distance. A train! Fergus limped toward the tracks as fast as he could. If there was a train coming, he wanted to be on it.

  White clouds of steam and smoke puffed over the tops of the trees, and an engine appeared. A passenger locomotive! Fergus was in luck. If he could just make it to the tracks in time, position himself just right, and then find a way to grab on to a speeding locomotive without ripping off one of his remaining good limbs …

  Fergus was liking this plan less and less the closer he got, but he didn’t have any other ideas.

  The train broke from the trees at what had to be forty-five, maybe fifty miles per hour, a Cheyenne-built Iron Chief, from the look of it. Fergus got ready to hop-skip as fast as he could alongside the train to try to grab on, but suddenly the air was filled with the squeal of the locomotive’s brakes. It was slowing! But of course: The engineer had just seen the fiery crash of the Black Maria, and was slowing down to see what had happened.

  Fergus hopped along with the train until it slowed enough for him to grab a handrail and climb aboard. None of the passengers noticed Fergus come in. They all had their noses pressed to the windows on the other side of the train, straining to see the wrecked airship in the lake. Fergus made his way to an empty seat and plopped down wearily.

  Would the train take on survivors from the crash? What if Edison and his men were brought to the same train and found him here? Fergus looked around for a place to hide, even briefly debating getting back off the train. But the Iron Chief never truly stopped. It picked up speed again and moved on, its engineers apparently deciding that their schedule was more important than stopping to help.

  More kind souls, Fergus thought cheerlessly. He’d had his fill of unhelpful people.

  Passengers returned to their seats as the show out the window slid past, and Fergus found he was sitting in the empty fourth seat with a Cherokee family of three—a mother, a father, and a small boy. All three of them eyed him warily, this new Yankee stranger who had magically appeared mid-journey while their backs were turned.

  The boy clutched a little wind-up toy machine man, watching Fergus with wide eyes. The mother pretended to go back to reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but without her reading glasses on, Fergus noticed. Her husband was more blatant, giving Fergus the obvious once-over. Fergus realized he must be quite a sight: black lines like tattoos on every inch of his face and arms and legs, a mechanical contraption on his bandaged left knee, a frazzled and torn kilt, and sopping wet from his dip in the lake.

  “Um, accident in the dining car,” Fergus improvised. “And the tattoos are tribal. Ancient Keltic knots and all that.”

  Neither parent was buying it. Fergus tried friendly instead. “That’s a nice machine-man toy you’ve got there,” he said to the boy.

  The kid buried his face in his mother’s side.

  Charming, Fergus thought. It didn’t matter. As long as he was headed away from Edison and his men, he could manage. Still, it would be nice to know where he was going.

  “So, um, where are you from?” he asked.

  The adults said nothing for a long time. Fergus waited.

  “Chota,” the father said at last.

  Fergus had been to the Cherokee capital once, to take an airship north to Jersey to live with Mr. and Mrs. Henhawk. Carolina was Cherokee territory. He nodded appreciatively. “And … where are we headed? I mean, where are you headed. I know where I’m going, of course.”

  The father narrowed his eyes at him. “Standing Peachtree.”

  “Ah! Same as me! Same as me,” Fergus said. He settled back in his chair and smiled, his hair still dripping down his back. That was about all he was going to get out of thes
e folks, he figured, and it was all he really needed. Sometime soon he would be in Standing Peachtree, and then—

  And then what? Hachi had said something about a school, someplace they could hide out, but would she even make it? He peered out the window, searching the skies. Had Mr. Rivets been able to bring the Hesperus down safely? Was Hachi even still alive? Just asking the question weighed on him more than his cold, sodden clothes. All he could hope, he decided, was that Hachi and Mr. Rivets had survived and would meet up with him in Standing Peachtree. As for Archie—

  Fergus sagged. Archie wouldn’t be joining them in Standing Peachtree, or anywhere else. Archie was dead.

  Archie was dead, Fergus’ old friend Kano Henhawk was dead, and who knew how many more people had died in the wreck of the Black Maria after he blasted it. Or back in the swamps while Fergus had his head down working on the Archimedes Engine. People seemed to get hurt no matter what Fergus did.

  Boom! The train lurched like it had hit something, tossing passengers out of their seats. The Cherokee mother flew into Fergus’ arms, and passengers cried out as luggage rained down on them from the storage compartments above. Fergus helped the woman back to her feet amid whoops and yells and raygun blasts from outside, and the passengers rushed again to the other side of the train to see what was happening.

  Fergus didn’t have to hurry over to know what was going on. He needed the time to get ready. Crivens! Couldn’t Edison give him a moment’s peace?

  Fergus cast around for something to help him defend himself, but it wasn’t like there were any oscillating rifles lying about. He searched frantically through the luggage that had fallen on him. Clothes, books, toys … nothing here that could make a weapon. Static crackled as he slid clothes around inside one of the suitcases, and it was like it had sparked his brain. Lektricity! He could try to get a static charge from the clothing.

  Fergus pulled out the silky piece of clothing and held it up. It was an enormous pair of ladies’ underpants.

  Fergus blushed, but desperate times called for desperate measures. He took the bloomers in both hands and rubbed them together, absorbing the static lektricity they gave off.