The League of Seven

by Alan Gratz

  Odis Harjo, the poet.

  Iskote Te, the gray haired.

  Oak Mulgee, the machinist.

  The first time, there had been nothing she could do. But since then she had trained every summer. Spent her parents’ fortune. Dedicated her life to becoming the perfect fighting machine.

  John Wise, the politician.

  Emartha Hadka, the hero of Hickory Ground.

  Harmer Thlah, the wicked.

  All that time, all that money, all that training, and she hadn’t been able to save her friends. Still hadn’t destroyed her enemies.

  Hahyah Yechee, the sheriff.

  Thomas Stidham, the horse breeder.

  Arkon Nichee, friend to many.

  She was a failure. That’s all there was to it. She had failed to kill Edison. Failed to kill the thing imprisoned under the swamp. Failed to save her friends.

  Claiborne Lowe, twelve times a grandfather.

  Pompey Yoholo, seventh son of a seventh son.

  Woxe Holatha, the banker.

  This was her punishment: to live while everyone else around her died. Unless she could break the cycle. Go back to Florida, to the land of her parents and her parents’ parents, the home of her people, and do what she should have done that night twelve years ago:

  Die.

  Ficka Likee. Petolke Likee. Ockchan Harjo. Micco Chee. Sower Sullivan. Cosa Yoholo. Artus Harjo. Abraham Emathlau. Tuscooner Thlah. Noble Kinnard. Chofolop Fixico. Stana Haley. On and on she recited their names, counting them off on her beaded bracelet as Mr. Rivets trudged on through the woods. Nocose Stidham. Gristy Perryman. Nehar Larne. Tall Pot Yoholo. Konip—

  “Miss Hachi. Miss Hachi,” she finally heard Mr. Rivets saying. “My mainspring has run down. Miss Hachi, do you hear me? I have wound down. Miss Hachi—”

  Hachi blinked and realized they had stopped. Night had fallen, and she was shivering. How long had she been counting out the names?

  “Yes. I’m sorry. Of course,” she said. She slipped from Mr. Rivets’ arms and limped around behind him to turn his key.

  “Many thanks,” Mr. Rivets said, straightening. “I worried I might run down completely before you heard me.”

  Hachi was still disoriented. She’d been so focused on her mantra she had neglected the here and now—a dangerous thing to do. She needed to rest. To regroup. To pull herself together.

  “Why don’t we stop here for the night?” she suggested. “There’s an outcropping of rocks over there that should give us some shelter if it rains. I’ll need a fire to keep warm though.”

  “Very good, miss. I’ll just see to some firewood,” Mr. Rivets told her. “And then, perhaps, a dinner of roasted mushrooms stuffed with onions and chopped pecans? I saw everything I need as we walked. It would be no trouble at all to—”

  “No, don’t go,” Hachi interrupted, surprising herself as much as the machine man. “I—I’d like you to stay close, if that’s all right. I’m not very hungry anyway.”

  “As you wish, Miss Hachi,” the Tik Tok said, and he moved off to gather wood nearby.

  Hachi hated admitting she needed company right now, and she cursed her own weakness. But the feeling of loneliness and failure was just too overwhelming. Her family, her friends, her relatives, her clan—just about everyone she had ever known and loved was dead and she had failed to help them. Right now, even a machine man was welcome company. She called what was left of her circus out, and they did tricks for her in the air while he was gone.

  Mr. Rivets soon had a fire crackling, and Hachi warmed herself by it, declining again his offer to cook her a feast from the forest. With his Chef card in, Mr. Rivets seemed to view the world as though it were one great pantry with which to cross-reference the recipes in his database.

  “I’m sure I saw some kale nearby, miss,” he tried again. “I could sauté a little with some garlic…”

  “No thank you, Mr. Rivets.”

  Hachi thumbed through the beads on her wrist, picking up where she had left off as she stared into the flames.

  Konip Fixico. Chular Fixico. Tallassee Tustunnugee. Long John Gibson. Talkis Yoholo.

  “Pardon the interruption, miss,” Mr. Rivets said.

  “I’m really not hungry, Mr. Rivets. I’ll be fine.”

  “Yes, miss. I was just going to inquire as to the names you’ve been repeating. Is it a poem? A cypher? A mnemonic device of some kind?”

  “I—how did you—can you read my mind?” Hachi asked.

  “No, miss. You said them out loud all afternoon as we walked. And you muttered them before, on the Hesperus.”

  Hachi hadn’t realized anyone else could hear her. How many times had others heard her saying her mantra when she thought she was thinking it to herself?

  “I thought I was just saying them in my head,” she said.

  “If I may, miss, that is not surprising. I spoke to you a number of times while we traveled, pointing out a variety of fruits and berries I could use in recipes, but you were unresponsive—except for the continuation of your list of names and their associations.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “It’s quite all right, miss. But I am curious—unless it is a personal matter, of course.”

  It was personal, more personal than anyone could know. Hachi’s natural instinct was to tell Mr. Rivets it was none of his business—or anyone else’s, for that matter. But suddenly she saw that she was only keeping the names a secret because it was easier for her. Because it hurt to talk about them. If she really wanted to honor these people, if their memory was worth dying for, wasn’t it worth sharing with as many other people as she could before she too was gone?

  Mr. Rivets sat clicking and whirring across the fire from her, watching her with a little tilt to his head. Could she tell him what she had never been able to tell Ms. Ambrose back at school? What she’d never even told Tooantuh in their quietest moments?

  “They’re the names of all the men from my mother’s tribe,” she told him. “I—they—” She hardly knew where to begin. Her mother had told her the story many times, but Hachi had never told it herself. “All I remember is the lightning, and the green flame, like the fire Edison conjured the other night in the glade. But my mother told me the rest. When I was a year old we went to Chuluota, near the glade where you found me. While we were there, a group of strangers came to town. Some of them were Yankees and some were First Nations, but all of them were servants of the Swarm Queen. That was the name my mother’s tribe had for it. The darkness that lived beneath the swamps.”

  “Malacar Ahasherat,” Mr. Rivets said. “The Mangleborn that took Archie’s parents.”

  Hachi nodded. “No one knew the names of these outsiders, or why they had come to Chuluota, but they—they killed every man in the town. One hundred of them. Every man over the age of seventeen.” She paused, looking into the fire. “They killed women too, but my mother says the strangers didn’t really care about them. The women of my clan were shot or slashed to drive them away so the strangers could deal with the men. One of them picked me up and dragged a knife across my neck.” Hachi put a hand to the long scar beneath her face, her eyes still on the fire.

  “How did you survive?” Mr. Rivets asked.

  “My mother. She took me up in her arms and held a hand to my bleeding neck and ran—ran through the night to the next town, where a surgeon sewed me back together.”

  Mr. Rivets let her sit in silence for a few moments, then asked, “What did they want with the men? The servants of Malacar Ahasherat who attacked your town?”

  “When the warriors from the next town went to Chuluota the next day, they found the bodies. Every man of my mother’s tribe had been killed. From what the warriors could tell, the strangers had laid the men of Chuluota on an ancient stone altar, one by one, and slit their throats. That same stone altar Fergus was on, in the glade. The strangers drained their blood, then threw the empty bodies off into the swamp. One hundred of them. They worked some kind of
magic like Edison did the other night, with lightning and machines and green flame and blood. That’s why I share a connection to the monster. I was there. I’ve had dreams of her since I was twelve months old.”

  Freckles the giraffe laid her long neck on Hachi’s arm.

  “After that, no one returned to Chuluota,” she said. “There were too many ghosts. My mother took me back to Standing Peachtree, but she died soon after of a broken heart. But not before she taught me the names of every last man who had died, and something to remember him by. Including the last one: Hololkee Emartha, my father.”

  “Hololkee Emartha? The Hololkee Emartha?” Mr. Rivets asked. “Former chairman of the Emartha Locomotive and Machine Man Company? The richest man in the United Nations?”

  Hachi nodded.

  “Hololkee Emartha,” Mr. Rivets said reverently. “The Maker.”

  “He inherited the family genius for engineering. He made these for me,” she said, meaning the clockwork animals in her lap. “My circus. When I was born.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “He made them for my crib. To sing and dance in the air above me. Now they’re all I have left of him.”

  “Hololkee Emartha lived in Standing Peachtree, where the corporate headquarters are for the Emartha Locomotive and Machine Man Company,” Mr. Rivets said. “What were you doing in Florida?”

  “Visiting my grandmother,” Hachi said. “My mother was born in Chuluota. The town that once existed there. We shouldn’t even have been there that night.”

  “And they never caught the people who murdered your mother’s tribe?”

  “No. I spent every spare minute—every night and weekend and summer I had away from school—teaching myself to fight, to be the best warrior anyone had ever known, so that one day I could punish the men and women who destroyed my family. And all the time I searched for the people who had been there that night. Last month, I finally found one. One of the people who killed my father. My mother. Her tribe. One of the people who ruined my life. Edison.”

  “You were there to kill Mr. Edison,” Mr. Rivets said. “And then … to attempt to destroy the Mangleborn? With the dynamite?”

  “Yes.”

  “Killing yourself as well, I must point out.”

  Hachi looked away into the darkness. “I should be dead already, Mr. Rivets. I should have died that night, with the rest of my people. With my family.”

  “You’ll forgive me, miss, if I fail to see the logic in that.”

  “Why me, Mr. Rivets? Why did my mother and my father and my grandmother and my whole tribe die, but I didn’t?”

  “Why should some not survive?” Mr. Rivets asked. “If Master Archie’s ancestors had all died out when the first among them died, I would not have been able to serve many more generations of Dents. It is undoubtedly a tragedy your parents died as they did. When viewed another way, however, it is a miracle that you survived. And if you will permit the observation, miss, you have not just survived, you have flourished. Like a tempered steel blade hardened in the blacksmith’s forge, you have come out stronger and sharper than before. You are, in short, the most extraordinary thirteen-year-old I have known in more than one hundred years of service.”

  “Slag it all, I don’t want to be tempered steel! I don’t want to be the greatest warrior who ever lived!” Hachi told him. “I want to go to school, and worry about homework, and clothes, and boys. I want to laugh and play and live like other kids.” Tears streamed down her face now. “I want my parents back, Mr. Rivets.”

  “Of course, miss. But choices like that are not ours to make. I too feel responsible for the loss of my family. Ever since our encounter with Mr. Edison and Mr. Shinobi in the glade, I have continually played out the variables in my clockworks to determine if another course of action might have saved them.”

  Hachi sniffled, trying to regain control. “I’m so sorry. You’ve lost everyone too, haven’t you? Mr. and Mrs. Dent, and now Archie. What happens to machine men when their owners die?”

  “Tik Toks are property, miss. Like the rest of the Dent estate, I will most likely be put up for auction to pay off their creditors—but I am not convinced Mr. and Mrs. Dent are dead. Master Archie assured me he had seen them in his dreams, and I trust his intuition, as I have none.”

  “They are,” Hachi told him. “They’re alive. I’ve seen them in my dreams too.”

  “Then I shall go back to Florida,” Mr. Rivets said. “I will go back to where I lost them, and I will do whatever I can to rescue them—or wind down trying.”

  “It’s hopeless,” Hachi told him.

  “Hope—and its antithesis—are not part of my programming, miss.”

  Hachi nodded through her tears. They weren’t part of her programming either. Not anymore.

  “If I told you about the men of my tribe who died, Mr. Rivets, if I recited the hundred names,” Hachi asked, “would you record them on your memory cards?”

  “It would be my honor, miss,” said Mr. Rivets.

  23

  Archie roared. His club rang out on Brynhildr’s shield, knocking her back into the shallow water. The Yellow Emperor lit a rocket that screamed at him and exploded, setting the pelt on his back on fire. A ruby raygun blast cut through the darkness, searing him. He felt the pain and screamed, but it didn’t kill him. It didn’t even hurt him.

  Nothing could hurt him.

  He was the Great Bear.

  This is your birthright, Malacar Ahasherat whispered in his head as he destroyed the Yellow Emperor’s South-Facing Chariot. You are Mangleborn, she told him as he swiped his club at one of Eshu’s ghost-images of himself. You are the Jandal a Haad, she sang as Archie kicked the Atlantean hero Cadmus before he could sow the teeth of Yog-Lerna and summon his Spartoi warriors.

  The Yellow Emperor’s chemicals burned on his hunched, heaving back, making him look like a crackling orange demon glowing in the night. He howled at the red moon as his friends fell beneath his club.

  He was the Great Bear. He was unbeatable. He was the Jandal a Haad.

  He was a monster.

  * * *

  “I’m not a monster!” Archie cried out, sitting up straight.

  “I am glad to hear it,” an old Cherokee man said, sitting cross-legged beside him. He wore a white shirt under a black vest, with a bright red scarf tied around his head to hold back his stringy black hair. Wrinkles lined his brown face, but his eyes were young and alight with mischief.

  Archie panted, bathed in sweat. He had been dreaming. He had dreamed he was the Great Bear, fighting his friends. Fighting the League. He was the Great Bear, but Malacar Ahasherat had called him Jandal a Haad. Was she talking to him, Archie the dreamer, or to the Great Bear in the dream? Or both?

  Archie tried to focus on the here and now. He was naked underneath a woven blanket, in a hot, smoky room filled with jars and medical equipment and books. The air smelled like herbs and dirt. A fire smoldered in the center of the room, and here and there cots were lined with animal skins. He recognized one of them right away: the Great Bear’s pelt.

  The pelt—the pelt was the last thing he remembered about falling from the Hesperus. He had lost his grip on it and it ripped from his fingers, fluttering up and away as the airship grew smaller and the world below him got closer and closer.

  Archie put his hands to his head, his chest, his legs.

  “Looking for injuries?” the Cherokee man asked him. “Your little friend hasn’t let me get too close, but from what I can see, you haven’t any.”

  “My little friend?”

  A tiny clockwork elephant with wings fluttered up in front of Archie and trumpeted.

  “Tusker!”

  The elephant landed on top of Archie’s blanket protectively, guarding him from the old man across the room as if the little wind-up toy were a full-sized elephant. Tusker had survived the fall! But that made sense. Tusker had wings.

  Archie didn’t. So how was he still in one piece?

  Archie looked around again at the
cots and the books and the jars. “Are you a doctor?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the man told him. “Not that you need one. I daresay you’ve never needed a doctor in your entire life, have you?”

  Archie frowned. He’d never been to the doctor, no, but that wasn’t so unusual, was it? Not every boy got broken arms and legs or cuts that needed sewing up. But now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d even been sick.

  The old man smiled. “My name is Hul-lih, but you may call me John Otter.”

  “How did I—the last thing I remember was—but that’s impossible,” Archie whispered.

  “Two young lovers away in the woods saw you fall from the sky.” John Otter clapped his hands. “Smack! You left a boy-sized hole.”

  The old man crossed the room toward him. Tusker tensed, raising his little tusks defiantly. “Your clothes were ripped and shredded,” John Otter said. “All that survived intact were this overly protective clockwork marvel, that curious white animal skin, and you. Three wonders, each more incredible than the last.”

  The pelt must have protected me, Archie thought. That’s what saved me. I was wrapped up in it, and it absorbed the impact. Broke my fall. But Archie distinctly remembered losing it in midair. Watching it slip away. Somehow he must have gotten it back … or lucked into falling on it?

  John Otter bent over to pick up a kettle, and Archie caught a glimpse of a black tattoo on his arm: a pyramid eye inside a seven-pointed star.

  “That tattoo,” Archie said. “You’re a Septemberist!”

  “Oh, do you know it?” John Otter said casually. He hung the kettle over the fire and pulled two pottery cups from a cabinet. “Yes. My family have fought the Mangleborn for many generations. As the medicine men of my clan, it is our duty to watch the Earth for signs of their return, and to do what we can to prevent it. As have your family in their way, I take it? Your adopted family, I mean.”

  “Adopted? What? I—no.” What a strange old man! “I mean, yes, my family have been Septemberists for centuries. When I grow up I’m going to be a member too. But I’m not adopted.”