The League of Seven (11 page)

Fergus nodded, sniffing back tears, and they hugged one last time. Della looked back and forth between her mother and Fergus, frowning at their tears.

“Zee, I need you,” Hachi whispered, and the little flying zebra leaped from her bandolier to flutter in front of her.

“Horsie!” Della said.

“Zee, I want you to take good care of this little girl. Do you understand? She's yours now,” Hachi told Della, and the little zebra buzzed over and landed in the toddler's hands. “You take good care of her, and she'll be your best friend forever.”

“Horsie!” Della said again.

Hachi's eyes watered. “You take good care of each other,” she said, and turned away.

Archie walked alongside Hachi as they hauled the food back to the
Hesperus
. “I can't believe you gave her one of your toy animals.”

“Della doesn't understand what's happened, but she will one day. And then she'll need a friend,” Hachi told him. “Just like me. Zee and the others were the only friends I had when my father was murdered too.”

 

11

Archie pressed his face against a porthole as Mr. Rivets swung them down close for their approach to New Rome. The sky over the biggest city in the United Nations was filled with airships—hundreds of them—taking off from public parks and docking at skyscrapers like the seven-story-tall Emartha Machine Man Corporation building. Submarines plied the choppy waters of the harbor on ferry routes to Breucklen and Queens County. Giant coal-driven machine men laid cobblestones for roads. Locomotives steamed away on elevated platforms. The city was like one great machine, all its parts working in synchronization. No matter how many times he visited, Archie loved seeing it all.

Watching over the city with him was the huge statue of mighty Hiawatha out in the harbor. Hiawatha was the legendary founder of the Iroquois Confederacy, the league of nations that had saved the European settlers' lives a hundred years ago when the Darkness fell. Cut off from the support, trade, and authority of the Old World, the colonists of New England had retreated to the cities on the coast and struggled to survive. Just when things looked their worst, a savior had come—not from the east, over the suddenly impassable waves, but from the west, from the very people the Europeans had been driving off their lands. The Iroquois Confederacy adopted the settlers as a seventh tribe—the Yankee tribe—and invited more tribes to join them, becoming the United Nations of America. The new confederacy stretched from the Atlantis Ocean to the Mississippi River, and was rivaled in power only by Acadia in the north, New Spain to the south, and the Republics of Texas and California to the west.

Archie caught Hachi watching out the window too.

“First time to New Rome?” he asked.

Hachi pulled away from the window, trying to look uninterested. “I've seen better. The wheeled city of Cheyenne. Now
that's
impressive.” Hachi went back to her hammock to wait, but Archie saw her still craning her neck to look outside as they flew into the city.

That neck with the awful scar on it. She'd said her father had been killed. Did she get the scar at the same time?

Mr. Rivets took the
Hesperus
in to moor at New Rome's Central Park, the public parking green on Mannahatta Island where dozens more airships of various sizes and designs twisted in the wind. Grazing sheep scattered as they made anchor. Archie swapped Mr. Rivets' Airship Pilot talent card out for his New Rome and Surrounding Areas Visitors Guide card—his parents had bought it specially for trips to the city—and one paid parking toll later they were on their way to find John Douglas.

“I only know him as Uncle John,” Archie said as they walked, making sure to go slowly enough for Fergus to keep up. “He comes by our house in Philadelphia a couple times a year, and he always sits and talks with me.”

“What about?” Hachi asked.

Archie shrugged. “What I've learned in school, what I think about things. Nothing important.”

“What's he do?” Fergus asked.

“He is a printer, Master Fergus,” said Mr. Rivets. “Both publicly, as a profession, and privately, for the Septemberists.”

“This League you told us about, it's different from the Septemberists?”

“Yes,” said Archie. “A long time ago, so far back nobody really remembers when, seven heroes from different parts of the world came together to use their powers to defeat the Mangleborn.”

“Powers?” Hachi asked. “What kind of powers?”

“Superhuman powers. Oh! This is what I realized back in Jersey, when I saw you putting together your knee brace, Fergus! We're like three new heroes!”

“What?” Hachi asked.

“See, the original League of Seven beat the Mangleborn and hid them away in prisons in the earth and under the sea. But then the world forgot, see? The Mangleborn were gone and the League went away, and all of it just became legends. Stories about heroes and titans and monsters. People forgot, and they discovered lektricity all over again, and the Mangleborn fed off it and broke free. So a new League of Seven had to come together to save the world!”

“Heroes with superpowers,” Hachi said doubtfully.

“Yes,” said Archie. “And it keeps happening over and over again. The League beats the Mangleborn and hides them away, centuries go by and everybody forgets, and then somebody starts experimenting with lektricity again.”

“Like Edison,” Fergus said.

“Right. But last time, after the Medieval League of Seven defeated the Mangleborn, the Septemberist Society was founded. It's a secret society of regular people who work to keep the world safe from lektricity and the Mangleborn. That's what my parents and Uncle John do, along with a bunch of other people, I guess. Is that right, Mr. Rivets?”

“More or less, sir. The Dent family have been Septemberists for centuries, long before coming to the Americas.”

“So what's this about us being three new heroes?” Fergus asked.

“Oh! Right,” said Archie. “So, the seven superhuman heroes, they only come together when the Mangleborn rise, when the world needs them most. But they're always the same! I mean, not the same
people
, but the same kind of heroes. There's always a tinker—a maker—like Huang Di or Wayland Smith or Kaveh. And that's you, Fergus! There's always a warrior too, the greatest fighter of the age, and the way you fought that machine man Mr. Shinobi, Hachi, it reminded me of those champions—Gilgamesh and Brynhildr and Hippolyta. And there's always a law-bringer, a scholar, a strongman, a trickster—”

“And … which one are
you
supposed to be, exactly?” Hachi asked. “What's
your
superpower?”

“I'm the leader! The Theseus. The Arthur. The Rama. The one who speaks for the League.”

Hachi and Fergus looked at him skeptically.

“Well, I'm the one who knows the most about the League and the Mangleborn,” Archie said, pouting.

“If we're a new League of Seven, where are the other four?” Hachi asked.

Archie shrugged again. “I don't know. Maybe we just haven't found them yet.”

“But, wait,” said Fergus. “I thought you said this League, the seven heroes, they only show up when the beasties rise and the world comes to an end.”

“They do. My parents think that's why we lost contact with the Old World. They think the Mangleborn have already risen there and taken over. And the Americas are next.”

Fergus looked pale. “I think I'd rather there not be a new League for another hundred years, then. At least until I'm long gone.”

“Here we are, Master Archie,” said Mr. Rivets.

They stopped in front of a simple brownstone building with a sign over the door that said
JOHN G. DOUGLAS, STEAM PRINTER AND TYPESETTER
.

“Remember, the Septemberists are a secret,” Archie told them. “Uncle John is probably the only person here who even knows they exist. Just let me do the talking.”

Hachi rolled her eyes, but she said nothing.

A bell on the top of the door jangled as Archie went inside. The reception area of the print shop was small, with three wooden chairs on one side and a bookshelf of newly printed and bound editions on the other. A fair-haired woman in a blue dress sat sideways at her desk, facing a smaller desk with a typewriter on it. She turned at the sound of the doorbell, giving them a big, fake smile.

“Hello!” she said. “Welcome to the offices of John G. Douglas, steam printer, typesetter, and Septemberist.”

“Some secret,” Hachi muttered behind him.

The woman's big smile worried Archie. “Um, hi,” he said. “We, uh—my name's Archie Dent, and I, uh, we—oh!” The Septemberist pass phrase! He should use that first. “Thirty days hath September.…”

“We need to see Mr. Douglas,” Hachi cut in. “Septemberist business.”

“Thank you for your inquiry,” the receptionist said, still smiling. “Please have a seat. Someone will be with you in just a moment.”

“Look here, you smiling flange,” Hachi began.

“Thank you for your inquiry,” the receptionist said again. “Please have a seat. Someone will be with you in just a moment.”

“Thanks! We'll just wait over here,” Archie said. He grabbed Hachi and Fergus and pulled them over to the chairs along the wall, and the woman at the desk turned back around and put her hands on the typewriter.

“What are you doing?” Hachi asked.

“We've seen this before. Me and Mr. Rivets, back at the Septemberist headquarters. Look at her typewriter. There's no paper in it. And the p-mail. Look at the tubes.”

Archie nodded to the wall behind the woman's desk, where half a dozen glass pneumatic tubes came down from the ceiling. Just about every business and home in the city had at least one p-mail line, in which rolled-up messages could be delivered in airtight capsules either to other rooms or to other buildings around the city—even the country—via a series of tubes called the Inter-Net. The capsules were pushed along the tubes by compressed air until they popped out at their final destination. But the print shop's tubes were clogged. There were half a dozen capsules backed up in each.

John G. Douglas' inbox was full, and no one was answering the p-mails. Archie knew that wasn't a good sign.

“You've seen this before? When?” Hachi asked.

Archie told Hachi and Fergus all about the thing in the catacombs of Septemberist Society headquarters, and how its little bug babies had affected his parents and the Septemberist council.

“You knew this society of yours was being controlled by a monster and you brought us all the way back here anyway?” Hachi said.

“Not all of them! I didn't know if Uncle John was being controlled by it too! And he still might not be. We have to find him!”

Hachi gave Archie an angry look before stalking off down the hall. Archie shot a glance at the receptionist, afraid she would stop them, but she still sat with her hands on the typewriter and not typing. She was probably still smiling too.

“Hold on,” Archie whispered they caught up to Hachi. “What if somebody comes for us?”

“Who?” Hachi asked. “She never told anyone we were here.”

The hallway off the reception area was lined with offices, each of which had some print shop employee sitting at a desk doing nothing but smiling. They didn't react at all as Archie and the others walked past.

“This sure is one happy company,” Fergus said, “but I don't think I'd want to work here.”

In another room down the hall a woman ran a hand-cranked printing machine. She turned the drum as mechanically as one of those cheap, single-purpose Tik Toks the Emartha Corporation sold for cleaning dishes.
Ka-chunk-chunk. Ka-chunk-chunk. Ka-chunk-chunk.
But the woman wasn't making copies of anything. She was just running the machine.

“We've got to find Uncle John,” Archie whispered, and he started off again down the hall.

Hachi grabbed his arm and pointed.
“Look at her neck.”

Beneath the tight bun of the woman's hair, just visible above her high collar, was a bug just like the ones on Archie's parents. Just like the ones on the Septemberist council members.

“I told you,” Archie whispered.

Schnik.
Hachi drew her dagger.

“No, don't,” Archie said. He pointed to a door at the end of the hall marked “John G. Douglas, Printer.” They crept down the hall, and Archie put his hand on the knob and turned it.
Don't be smiling, don't be smiling, don't be smiling—

Uncle John sat behind his desk, smiling.

Archie wilted. Uncle John was his last, best hope for rescuing his parents. If John couldn't help them—

“Hello, Archie Dent,” John said.

“Uncle John!” Archie hurried to the desk. He must have just been smiling to see him! “Uncle John, I'm so glad you're all right. All the other people here and at Septemberist headquarters, they have these bugs on the back of their necks, and—”