The Dragon Lantern (22 page)

James wiped dust away from a brass plaque on the wall, and Archie gasped. Etched into the brass was a pyramid eye inside a seven-pointed star. The symbol of the Septemberist Society.

“By the Maker,” Mr. Rivets said.

“You know this logo?” James asked. “It's all over everything here.”

“Yes,” Archie said. “Yes, we know it.”

“Then maybe you'll understand this,” James said. He led them to another building, past rooms filled with overturned, dusty furniture and rooms full of books and toys, to a dark room filled with mothballed machinery. Jesse James threw a switch on the wall, and windows opened at the top of the walls, letting in a flood of light.

There, trapped in an enormous block of blue amber like a bug, was a girl.

A girl with wings.

17

Dr. Kenda threw a lever, and the tubes connected to the amber that held the bird girl began to hum. “I'm not sure this is going to work,” he said. “This technology—it's far in advance of anything I've ever seen or worked with before.”

Not for the first time, Archie wished Hachi and Fergus were there with him. Fergus would know exactly how to get the bird girl out of her translucent blue prison, and Hachi would know how to deal with her when she awoke.

If
she awoke.

“I still don't think she's alive in there,” Jesse James said. He and Mr. Rivets were the only others in the room.

“We have to try,” Archie said.

A large metal box with pipes flowing in and out of it clicked on, and a lightbulb came on above the blue amber.

“Lektricity,” Mr. Rivets said.

Archie nodded. Whatever this was, whatever the Septemberists had been doing here, it wasn't good.

Another machine kicked on, and another, and two more lights glowed above the girl in the hard resin.

“I would step back at this point,” Dr. Kenda told everyone.

The blue amber began to quiver, then ripple, and then all at once it vaporized, becoming a thin blue mist that was immediately sucked up by the tubes. The girl fell facedown onto the floor, suddenly free of the resin, and the machine clicked off.

The bird girl was perhaps fourteen years old, and was beautiful and horrible at the same time. The top part of her was mostly human and all elegant. She was Illini, with light brown skin, dark black hair, and a thin face with a long, sharp nose it was hard not to think of as a beak. Out of the back of her brown beaded shirt sprouted wings—long, folded wings with jet black feathers like a crow.

It was the bottom half of her that made Archie want to look away. Where her human legs should have been were two bird legs—rough, scaly things bent backwards at the knee. At the bottom of each, instead of feet, the bird girl had leathery talons, with four black claws on each. She reminded Archie of the Manglespawn—the awful children of humans and Mangleborn.

The bird girl's wings fluttered, and everyone in the room took a step back. She was alive! She tried to push herself up with her hands, but she was weak from her time in the amber. Mr. Rivets quickly moved to help her, and Archie joined him.

“Where—?” she asked. “What's—?”

“You've just been released from amber, miss,” Mr. Rivets said. “You may be disoriented.”

She looked around at them, blinking. “Where's—where's Henry? Where's Dr. Echohawk?”

“I'm sorry—none of those people are around anymore,” Archie said. “Whatever this place was, all the people who ran it are gone.”

“No—Henry was ambered with me,” the bird girl said. She moved quickly across the room, her grotesque bird legs making her bob like a chicken. She pulled away a dusty sheet, revealing another large block of blue amber underneath it.

Frozen inside this one was the rotten carcass of something that had the body of a boy, but the head, tail, and hooved hands and feet of a horse.

“Henry!” the bird girl said. She put a palm to the amber, bent her head to it, and sobbed.

“Whatever was done to you, it didn't work on him,” James said. “I'm sorry.”

“I
did it to him,” she said. “I did it to both of us, to save us. Oh, Henry. I'm so sorry.…”

Archie and the others gave her space. Finally she pulled herself away, and Jesse James threw the sheet back over the block of amber.

“How long?” she asked.

“How long have you been in the amber?” Mr. Rivets asked. “What year was it when you froze yourself?”

“Eighteen fifty,” the bird girl said.

Eighteen fifty! It was 1875 now. The bird girl had been stuck in amber for twenty-five years—and hadn't aged a day in all that time.

When Mr. Rivets told her the year, she sat down on the floor with her back to the amber that was now Henry the horseboy's coffin and put her head in her hands.

“What happened here?” Archie asked her. “What was this place?”

“You don't know?” she asked.

“It's been abandoned for years,” James said. “This is a FreeTok city now.”

“They called it ‘The Forge,'” the girl said. “This is where they made me. This is where they made all of us.”

“They who, miss?” Mr. Rivets asked.

She shook her head. “I don't know. They never told us who they were. All we knew about them was their symbol—that pyramid with the eye in it. We called them the Aegyptians, but that wasn't their name.”

No. Archie and Mr. Rivets knew their name: They were the Septemberists. But what had they been doing out here at a secret base in the middle of the continent?

“We were orphans. All of us,” the girl said. “That's the first thing we realized—all our parents were dead or gone. The Aegyptians collected us from cities and villages all over. I'm from Shikaakwa. Twelvetrees was Crow. Henry was from California. Mina…” She didn't finish. “I want to get out of here,” she said.

Archie helped her to her feet again, and Jesse James stood aside to let her leave the lab. As she walked down the hall, she stopped and looked in at the rooms with the beds and books and toys.

“Gone now. They're all gone but me,” she said. “There were twenty-one of us. Twenty-one to start. Less at the end. This was my room,” she said. A piece of construction paper decorated with hand-drawn moons and stars said her name was Sings-In-The-Night.

“Why did they bring you here?” Archie asked. “What did they do to you?”

They came to a small room with a single row of chairs pointed toward a dark gray window. Through the window was another room, filled with more of the advanced machines. At the heart of it all was a metal table with arm and leg straps attached to it. Sings-In-The-Night's breath caught, and she backed against the wall.

“That's where they took us,” she said. “That's where they … did this to me.” She looked down at her hideous chicken legs. “That's where they used the lantern on us.”

“The lantern?”
Archie said. “What lantern?”

“It wasn't really a lantern, but that's what they called it. It
looked
like a lantern. It was silver, with dragons all over it.”

Archie was so stunned, he sat in one of the chairs. “The Dragon Lantern? They had it? Here?”

“It's what did this to me. Changed me. Gave me these wings, and these legs. It didn't work on everybody. Just some of us. We never understood why. I don't think they did either. All we knew was if it didn't work on you, they took you away. And if it did work on you … it hurt.”

“What happened to the kids who were taken away?” Archie asked.

“I don't know. But they were the lucky ones,” Sings-In-The-Night said. She hurried out of the room. “It worked differently on all of us,” she said, looking back down the hall at the rooms with colorful children's drawings taped to the doors. “It turned Twelvetrees into this … this minotaur, with the head of a bison. It made Ominotago into some kind of … blob thing. We didn't come back to our rooms, after. They had to put us in cages. One girl, it turned her into a fish. A mermaid, like in the storybooks. She suffocated to death. She needed salt water, and they didn't have any this far from the ocean. Never thought they'd need it. My friend Mina, it gave her tentacles. Like an octopus—but more of them. Changed her inside too. Or maybe she had always been that way, and we just never knew it. When they were finished, only seven of us survived.”

“Why?” James asked. “I mean, why'd they do it?”

“They told us they were making us into superheroes. That we were going to save the world. They called us the League of Seven.”

“No,” Archie whispered.
“No.”
Was this how he'd been created? Was this
where
he'd been created? A sudden thought seized him, and he ran down the hall, looking at all the names on the doors. Was his name here? Had he somehow forgotten all this? Blocked it from his memory?

“Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets called. “Master Archie, I was there when you were brought to your parents as an infant twelve years ago. I watched you grow up. This facility has been abandoned for nearly twenty-five years. This cannot be where you are from,” he said, like he could read Archie's mind.

Still, Archie read the name on every door. But Mr. Rivets was right—when he came to the end, his name wasn't there. He didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. But he and this place were connected by the Septemberists and the Dragon Lantern—that much he knew.

“What happened to the lantern?” he asked Sings-In-The-Night.

“I don't know. When they had the seven of us, they stopped using it on kids and started training us to be heroes. But Ominotago, Ivan, Twelvetrees, even Henry—they were all too far gone. They weren't human enough anymore. Henry had no hands. He couldn't even eat without a feed bag. And Ominotago—for Hiawatha's sake, Ominotago was just a brain and eyes floating in ooze. She couldn't handle what had been done to her. None of us could. But they told us we were heroes, and that Mina was our leader. And then they sent us to Beaver Run.”

“The village just outside of here,” James said. “The ghost town.”

“Is that what it is now?” Sings-In-The-Night said. “I expect it is. There was a fire. One of the buildings in town had caught fire, and it was spreading. The Aegyptians, they thought it would be a good test of our team. They took us to Beaver Run and told us to put out the fires and save the townspeople. It went … badly. Very badly. The townspeople thought we were monsters and attacked us. Mina turned the League against them, killing everyone, destroying everything. It was like hell—fire everywhere, people screaming, Mina laughing. Henry and I tried to stop her, tried to stop all of them, but they were mad. Insane. We weren't human anymore. None of us were. We were the monsters they all thought we were. The Aegyptians, or whoever they were, the scientists—they moved in with rayguns and killed the rest of them. Ominotago, Twelvetrees, Ivan, Renata. I saw a burning building collapse on Mina.”

“How did you survive?” Archie asked.

“I can fly,” Sings-In-The-Night said simply. “I grabbed up Henry, and flew us back here.”

“Why here? Why not run?” James asked.

“There was a scientist here, Dr. Echohawk. He'd been kind to me. I—I didn't know where else to go. But the Aegyptians who ran this place, they released something into the air, something to kill off everyone who was left. Dr. Echohawk and I had been working on the amber as a way to preserve things—people. So I … I ambered Henry and me, to protect us from the toxin.”

“You were the scientist,” Archie said, realizing that this “Forged” League had even been constructed to have the same roles as a real League of Seven.

“Some scientist,” she said. “I'm the only one who survived.”

“And they call us inhuman like it's a bad thing,” Jesse James said, and he left them to go outside.

Sings-In-The-Night put a hand to one of the pyramid eye logos on the wall. “Whoever the Aegyptians were, I'm glad they're gone,” she said.

Archie closed his eyes. There was no way he could keep it a secret from her. Not if he was going to ask her what he wanted to ask her. “They're not all gone,” Archie told her. “They're not called the Aegyptians either. They're called the Septemberists, and I'm one of them.”

Archie led her back outside, and they walked around Dodge City while he told her everything he knew—about the Septemberists, the Dragon Lantern, the Mangleborn, the ancient Leagues, and the new one he was putting together.

“You want me to become a part of your League?” Sings-In-The-Night asked incredulously. “After what your Septemberists did to me?”

“At least help me get the lantern back,” Archie said. “Whatever it did to you—whatever it did to
me
—we can't let it happen to anyone else.”

“I need to think about it,” Sings-In-The-Night told him, and with a flap of her great wings and a swirl of dust, she shot up into the air. Archie watched her circle as she gained altitude, and then she glided away on the warm evening air. As he watched her go, Archie wondered if he might never see her again.