The League of Seven

by Alan Gratz

  Hachi stabbed his mother in the leg. Mrs. Dent cried out and crumpled to the ground.

  “Mom!” Archie cried. He dropped the iron girder and fell to his knees to help her. “Mom! Are you all right?”

  Hachi slumped back against the machine and held on to her stomach.

  “You stabbed her!” Archie cried.

  “You were going to bash her brains in with a big metal bar,” Hachi said, her voice tired and weak. “After you did me and Fergus.”

  “Hi-yaaaah!” Fergus cried. He hobbled out from behind the machine with a lead pipe in his hands and whacked Archie in the head. Clang.

  Archie didn’t budge. He’d barely felt it.

  Fergus looked at the bent pipe in his hands, then lifted it to hit Archie again.

  “Stop. It’s all right,” Hachi told him. “He’s back.”

  “Oh. Sorry, White, but you kind of went barmy there for a minute.”

  Archie tore off part of his ragged shirt, and his father helped him tie it around his mother’s leg.

  “Callous, but effective,” Mr. Dent told Hachi. “I knew you were in there, Archie,” he said to his son. “We didn’t raise you to be a monster.”

  “I’m sorry,” Archie said. “I don’t know what came over me. I—” He saw the crack in his arm again and covered it so the others couldn’t see it. “I lost my head.”

  “Sticks and stones can’t break his bones,” sang an electronic voice behind them. “But they can hurt his friends.”

  Archie stood and turned. Edison’s great iron hulk waited behind him, Archie’s metal club in its hands. Edison raised it, aiming for Fergus. Archie stepped in front of his friend as the metal bar came flying down.

  Krang. Archie caught it in his hands. He understood now. The Mangleborn had shown him. Archie wasn’t just unbreakable. He was super strong. He always had been. Breaking little things all the time. Moving the Great Bear’s stela. Turning the valve in Atlantis to flood the machine men. Leaving a dent in the brass floor of the puzzle trap room.

  Archie had the strength of a hundred men, and he was going to use it on Edison.

  Archie wrenched the metal bar from Edison’s grip and whacked him with it. Wham. He dented Edison’s big round dome. Wham. He smashed out one of the windows. Wham. He broke off one of Edison’s arms. Wham. Wham. Wham. Wham. When the metal bar was bent beyond use, Archie tossed it aside and pounded on the iron suit with his fists.

  “I’m not—” Wham. “—a monster.” Wham. “You’re—” Wham. “—the monster.” Wham. “You’re a brain—” Wham. “—in a big metal jar!” Wham.

  Edison staggered back against the wall, his suit bent, broken, and fizzling. Archie pulled back his fist for one last punch, one that would tear the thing apart for good.

  “Archie!” Hachi cried. “Archie! The pit!”

  The floor rumbled. The low stone wall crumbled. Malacar Ahasherat roared, a sound like a hawk’s cry mixed with the buzzing of a million hornets, and up out of the pit rose the head of the real monster. The Swarm Queen. Archie felt icy, primeval fear course through him like it had in the glade when his hair had turned white, but this time he was ready. He had seen Malacar Ahasherat before in his dreams. Seen her inhuman arms and legs, her cicada wings, her fly-like, compound eyes. He was ready for her.

  The Swarm Queen’s giant wings fluttered as she tried to pull herself through the half-open seal on her prison. Her head turned, and her glassy eyes found Archie, mirroring him a thousand times back at himself.

  Jandal a Haad, she said.

  “My name,” he told her, “is Archie Dent.”

  Jandal a Haad, the Mangleborn said. Join me.

  “No thanks,” Archie told her. “But I know someone who’s dying to meet you.”

  Archie picked up what was left of Edison’s broken iron body. It should have been impossible—a twelve-year-old boy lifting something so gigantic, so heavy. But Archie had the strength of a hundred men.

  “Four and twenty blackbirds … baked in a pie,” Edison warbled.

  Archie trudged over to the pit, Edison held high over his head and sparking.

  “When the pie was opened … the birds began to sing,”

  “Always the same,” Archie told the Swarm Queen. “You rise again, and the League of Seven always put you down.”

  Malacar Ahasherat lashed out at Archie with a tentacle made of swarming insects, but she was too late. Archie hurled Edison’s iron body on top of the Mangleborn, and they both fell back into the pit, Malacar Ahasherat screaming, Edison singing. The insect tentacle dissolved into a cloud of buzzing, skittering bugs.

  “Fergus!” Archie yelled. “Seal it! Seal it now!”

  “There’s nothing I can do!” Fergus yelled back. He was desperately trying to operate the machine that controlled the seal, but it was too smashed. “Between you and Edison, you smashed the controls but good!”

  “No!” Archie ran over to the machine. “What needs to turn? Where? Show me.”

  Fergus studied the clockworks with his tinker’s eye. “There—that’s the one that should do it. But the gizmo’s broken. There’s no way I can work it—”

  Archie grabbed one of the cogs of the giant gear and pushed. The metal groaned, but it started to turn. Hand over hand Archie turned the enormous wheel, and the machine that controlled the seal on the tomb came to life. One by one the stone seals over the Swarm Queen’s prison closed—thoom thoom thoom—and it was done.

  Archie slumped to the floor, exhausted, and Hachi nodded at him.

  “Better,” she said wearily.

  33

  Edison had come by rented airship, which Archie and the others found tethered near the entrance. No one felt the least bit guilty about taking it.

  “It’s not like he’s going to be needing it anytime soon,” Fergus said. “Not where you threw him.”

  “About that, Archie…,” Hachi said.

  Archie looked to his parents. They sat at a little fold-out table in the airship’s cabin. Mr. Rivets had found food aboard the airship, and was plying them with chicken noodle soup.

  “What am I?” Archie asked them.

  “I told you, Archie,” his mother said. “You’re our son.”

  “But I’m not. Not biologically,” he added quickly. The voice in his head was gone, but the fear and doubt remained.

  “No,” Mr. Dent said. “No, you’re not our biological son.” He reached out and held Mrs. Dent’s hand. “We’ve never been able to have children of our own. The Society knew that, so when they found you, they brought you to us, to raise as our own.”

  “We were going to tell you we weren’t your birth parents, Archie,” Mrs. Dent said. “When you were older.”

  “Is that when you were going to tell me I was … I was a monster?” Archie said. He could feel the anger building up inside him, like steam pressure building in an engine. He took a deep breath. He couldn’t let the anger control him. Not like before, in the pit. He could never do that again.

  “You’re not a monster,” Mrs. Dent told him. “Never that, Archie.”

  “But we didn’t know you were … so strong. Invulnerable,” Mr. Dent said. “I promise, Son. If we had known, we would have told you. We could never have kept something like that from you.”

  “But you knew I was different. The Septemberist Society knew. Mr. Rivets knew. John Douglas knew. We found a scrapbook he kept, with pictures of me, and charts, and graphs. We lost it, but the Society was watching me. Measuring me.”

  “They told us you were the son of two Septemberists who’d been lost battling a Manglespawn in the South Americas,” Mrs. Dent said. “John said there might have been some infection, some contamination, from the Manglespawn. They asked us to tell them if there was anything strange about you, but there never was. You were a perfect baby. Strong and happy and…” She put a hand to her mouth. “Never sick. Not once. You were never sick.”

  “We ordered Mr. Rivets not to tell you,” Mr. Dent said. “But only because we knew
you were adopted, and wanted to tell you in our own time.”

  “I am truly sorry, Master Archie,” said Mr. Rivets. “It was never my desire to keep the truth from you.”

  “I know, Mr. Rivets,” Archie said. He knew the machine man couldn’t have lied to him if he’d wanted to, and that he’d been ordered to keep the secret. But still, he was glad to hear Mr. Rivets say he was sorry. “This couple John told you about. Were they my real parents?”

  “I don’t think so now,” Mrs. Dent said.

  No. Of course Archie’s parents weren’t human. Not both of them, anyway.

  “We only learned you weren’t … human … when we were connected to Malacar Ahasherat through those things on our necks,” Mr. Dent said. “The Mangleborn read our thoughts. It saw we had taken you in as an infant and raised you as our own. But we shared its thoughts too. That’s how we finally understood what you really were.”

  “Which is what, exactly?” Fergus asked. He and Hachi had been quiet, but listening.

  “The Jandal a Haad. That’s what it called you,” Mrs. Dent said. “The man made of stone.”

  “But that’s not right,” Fergus said. “No man is made of stone. I mean, it’s not physically possible. Look at him. He’s got white hair, and pasty skin, and fingers and toes that wiggle.”

  “And a punch like a steam engine,” Hachi said. “And an unbreakable body.”

  Archie knew there was one way to prove it, to show them he was truly, impossibly, made of stone. He’d hidden the crack on his arm from them because it made him a monster. He didn’t want to show them. He wanted them to think he might be human after all, that he wasn’t a monster. But how long could he hide what he was from his friends? From his parents? If they didn’t help him figure out what he was, who could?

  “Not totally unbreakable,” Archie said. He put his hand to his shirtsleeve, but was still afraid to show them. To show them would mean to admit once and for all he wasn’t human. That he was … something else. But he had to know what.

  “Archie, what is it?” his mother asked.

  Archie peeled back his sleeve and showed them the crack in his arm.

  Mrs. Dent gasped. They stared at the crack, all of them, for what felt like hours, before someone finally spoke.

  “Does it hurt?” Hachi asked.

  Archie shook his head.

  Fergus bent close to examine it. “Might be able to patch that with some mortar,” he said. Hachi punched him. “What?” Fergus protested. “There’s no sense in being all hush-hush about it now, is there?”

  “Not in this room,” Archie said. “Not between us.” His meaning was clear: He wanted to talk about it with his family and friends. He needed to. But not with anyone else. Everyone nodded.

  “We’ll worry about the practicalities later,” Mr. Dent said. “The first thing we’re going to do when we get back is go straight to Philomena Moffett and find out what more the Society knows. We’ll get answers for you, Son. For all of us.”

  Archie wanted to feel relief at that, but all he felt was a deeper, darker fear that the truth might be something he never wanted to know. Still, he appreciated the look of fierce protectiveness in his father’s eyes.

  “That would be brass,” Archie said.

  “Archie, we’ve told you repeatedly, we don’t approve of you using that slang,” his mother said.

  “Crivens,” Fergus said, laughing, “the boy’s made of stone, and you’re still worried about language?”

  “Archie is a Dent,” his mother said, “and the Dents are made of stronger stuff than stone.”

  Archie smiled. His mom and dad might not be his birth parents, but they were his family. They had raised him, and loved him, and he loved them too. Archie even let them hug him with Fergus and Hachi watching, though he’d squirmed out of hugs since he was seven. He didn’t care if the world was watching now. He needed to feel human again, if only for a moment.

  Because there was that crack in his arm to remind him that he wasn’t.

  “I’m ready to go home,” Archie said. He turned the crank to raise the airship’s anchor, and it snapped off in his hands. “I guess we know now why I’m such a klutz.”

  Fergus took the broken handle from him. “Here, I’ll fix it.”

  “What about you?” Archie asked Hachi. “Will you go back to school?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t go back to that life. Not ever. Edison was the only lead I had for what happened to my father. I knew he was there that night twelve years ago, but I never could learn any of the other names. But he said something down there today: Batty Blavatsky. The Joke of Chuluota.”

  “What’s Chuluota?”

  “The name of the town where my mother grew up. The town that was wiped out the night the strangers came. I’m going to find this Blavatsky person. Find out if she was there, and who else was with her, and why. And then make them pay.”

  “I’ll come along for the answers too,” Fergus said.

  “With which one of us?” Archie asked.

  “With both of you, of course.” He turned from working on the anchor crank. “You don’t think we can break up the team now, do you? There’s no reason we can’t get all the answers together. Besides,” he said, “we’ve still got four more of our League of Seven to find, haven’t we?”

  Archie had been the one to argue that they were a new League, but in his heart he’d never believed it. Not until they defeated Malacar Ahasherat. That’s what the League of Seven did: They put Mangleborn back in their prisons. They saved the world. Hachi was their warrior. Fergus was their tinker. And Archie—

  Archie was their strongman. Their Shadow. He knew that now. Neither Fergus nor Hachi had said a word to him about when he’d turned on them, almost killed them both, but it was there, between them. Archie caught Fergus’ eyes giving him the once-over before he finished fixing the anchor crank. Archie had seen that look before, in his dreams. In the eyes of Leaguers afraid of one of their own.

  Afraid of the Shadow.

  “Anchor’s aweigh, sirs,” Mr. Rivets said from the steering console. “Destination?”

  “Home, Mr. Rivets,” Archie told him. “We have a lot to do.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to my terrific editor, Susan Chang, both for her enthusiasm and her very useful Editor Talent card, to Bev Kodak and the YA Lit Track at DragonCon for first bringing us together, and to everyone at SCBWI Carolinas for bringing us back together again. Thank you to Emily Jenkins for reading an early draft and providing invaluable feedback, to Bill Householder for the loan of a bunch of Cthulhu mythos stories I hadn’t read, and to H. P. Lovecraft himself for writing the super weird and creepy stories that inspired the Mangleborn. Thanks also to Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, for putting me up for a month in the attic as the Children’s Writer in Residence while I worked on The League of Seven, and to my fellow Bat Cavers and my great friend Bob for all their support. Extra special thanks as always to my wife, Wendi, and my daughter, Jo, for not jumping out of the family airship every time I said, “So, there’s this one part of The League of Seven I need your help with.…” You guys are brass. And to steampunks everywhere—keep those boilers stoked!

  Read on for a preview of

  THE DRAGON LANTERN

  Book Two of The League of Seven

  Archie Dent dangled from a rope 20,000 feet in the air, watching the blue ribbon of the Mississippi River spin far, far below him. At that moment, he didn’t feel scared, or dizzy, or angry.

  He felt betrayed.

  “Retrieving the Dragon Lantern will be a simple task for three Leaguers,” Philomena Moffett had told him and his friends Hachi and Fergus. “For that’s what you are. The first of a new League of Seven.”

  Simple. That’s what the head of the Septemberist Society had called retrieving this lantern thing. Even though it was hidden at the heart of a Septemberist puzzle trap. On top of a giant helium balloon. Twenty thousand feet in the air.

  As he
hung from his safety line for what had to be the thousandth time in the last three days, all Archie could think was that Philomena Moffett had not been entirely honest with them.

  “Haul him up,” Hachi said. Her voice came through tinny and distant—and more than a little annoyed—in the speaking tube attached to Archie’s leather helmet. Fergus had built the helmets special. A mouthpiece, which snapped on just below the brass goggles Archie wore, brought fresh oxygen to him from the tank on his back, and connected to Archie’s ears were flexible speaking tubes that led to Hachi’s and Fergus’s helmets. All this was necessary—like the heavy, fur-lined coats and the spider’s web of ropes and carabiners they wore—to scale the mountain-sized helium kite high up in the thin atmosphere that held Cahokia In The Clouds afloat.

  Archie felt a lurch on his line, and then the familiar yank-yank-yank of Fergus’s ratchet as he was lifted back up. Soon he was close enough to take Hachi’s hand, and she helped him grab hold of the network of ropes that covered the vast canvas of the balloon.

  “Archie, you’ve got to hang on better,” Hachi told him.

  Archie flushed in embarrassment inside his leather helmet. Hachi Emartha hadn’t fallen off once in all the time they’d been at this, but that was to be expected. She’d spent the last three years of her life training to be the greatest warrior who ever lived. Everything she did was graceful, from eating her breakfast to killing Manglespawn.

  What really embarrassed Archie was that Fergus McFerguson had only slipped and fallen twice, and Fergus had only one good leg! His other leg, hobbled by a meka-ninja, now had only two settings—loose and useless, or straight and stiff—which he controlled with a knee harness he’d built himself.

  “I’m sorry,” Archie said. “I wasn’t made for this. I’m good at punching and being punched. Not hopping around like a monkey.”

  “Well, one of these times your safety line’s going to give way, and then you’ll really be sorry,” Hachi told him. “You do not want to test Fergus’s back-up plan.”