The League of Seven (9 page)

Archie ran his fingers through his hair. It was white as steam. All of it. White to the skin. His eyebrows too. Mr. Rivets might not have understood, but Archie did. Seeing the Mangleborn,
hearing
it inside his head had done this to him. It had touched his mind.
Jandal a Haad
. He remembered the words now. The same words the Septemberist council had spoken to him. He had no idea what they meant, but they scared him to the bone.

“We have to go back,” said the girl.

“What?” Archie asked. He was still staring at his white hair and thinking about the Mangleborn's terrible voice flooding his thoughts. Assaulting him.

“And do what?” Fergus asked.

“Kill Edison,” she said. “Kill this monster.”

Archie tore his eyes away from his white hair. “You can't kill the Mangleborn, or else somebody would have done it. That's why they're in prisons.”

“Then just Edison,” the girl said. “I need to finish what I started.”

“Why? What did Edison do to you?” Archie thought it might be the scar, but when would Edison have cut her? And why? But the girl didn't say. She just sat there with her arms crossed, staring at him.

“This is a job for the Septemberists,” Archie told her. “There's one person we know in New Rome who's a member of the Society. We'll let him know my parents are still alive, and what Edison's been doing.”

The girl gave Archie a tired look. Fergus coughed and looked away.

“They
are
alive,” Archie told them. “I've
seen
them. I know.”

“If we're going back to New Rome, I want to go to Jersey first,” Fergus said. “I need to see Kano's wife, Joanne. Tell her what happened.”

“If you're not going back to Florida, I'll go back alone,” the girl said.

“We don't have time for that,” Archie told Fergus. “And there's no sense going back alone when you'll just get killed,” he told the girl.

She stood suddenly. “There's a wasp on the ceiling.”

Archie and Fergus looked up. A solitary hornet crawled up near the gaslight chandelier.

“So what?” Archie said.

The girl glared at them. “Didn't you just say Edison was trying to raise something called ‘the Swarm Queen'?”

“It's just one wasp,” Archie said, and then he froze. He had thought the front windshield was black because it was dark outside, but now he could see that wasn't it at all.

The
Hesperus
was covered with wasps.

 

9

The wasp on the ceiling was joined by another two, then another five. Soon the airship cabin was buzzing with them.

“The wasps are coming in through the air circulation system!” Archie cried.

“Actually, sir, they appear to be
Vespa crabro,
” Mr. Rivets said, examining one that was trying to sting his brass hand. “Hornets, not wasps.”

Fergus leaned back on the medical bay bed, swatting the hornets away from him. “I don't care what they are. They've got stingers and I can't run. Help!”

“There's nowhere to run
to,”
the girl said. She batted hornets away as more came in through the air ducts. Soon they would be covered in the things. “Circus, showtime!” she said.

From the pouches in her bandolier burst her five winged wind-up animals—a lion, gorilla, giraffe, elephant, and zebra. The girl pointed at Fergus. “Keep the wasps off him!”

“Hornets, miss,” Mr. Rivets corrected her.

The flying animals swooped into action, biting, clawing, stomping, and kicking the insects around Fergus. He leaned back on his elbows and watched them work with the wide-eyed appreciation of a tinker, all thoughts of mortal peril suddenly gone.

Archie wanted some help too. The hornets were all over him. He pulled a blanket from one of the sleeping hammocks and swung it at them, but there were too many.

The girl pulled a fire extinguisher off the wall and aimed it at him. “Duck,” she said.

Archie hit the deck just as the fire extinguisher's chemical bath soaked the insects above him. They fell all around him, writhing and dying on the floor.

The chemical bath was a good idea, but it couldn't take care of all of them. Archie's eyes searched the cabin. There had to be something else they could use to fight the swarm! The only time he'd ever killed wasps back home was in the late fall, when it got so cold they stopped flying and slowed down long enough so he could smack them with a shoe.…

“Cold air. Mr. Rivets! We need to go higher! Take the
Hesperus
higher!”

“If you would just insert my Airship Pilot card, Master Archie, I shall endeavor to do so.”

Archie muttered a few words his parents would ground him for and scrambled for the talent card chest across the cabin. The girl was still pumping juice out of the extinguisher, but more wasps were coming in by the minute. Archie disengaged Mr. Rivets' Surgeon card, swatted a swooping hornet with it, and quickly replaced it with an Airship Pilot card from the case. The machine man immediately strode to the steering console, brushed some wet, wriggling hornets out of his way, and brought the airship under control.

“The extinguisher's running out!” cried the girl.

“I got an idea—I got an idea!” Fergus said. Wincing in pain, he hopped across the cabin, the girl's flying circus protecting him the whole way. Fergus slammed painfully into the wall and pulled away a brass panel, revealing a network of ducts and fittings and tubes.

Archie swatted at more hornets. “What are you doing?”

“I'm just … rerouting … a couple of things,” Fergus said. He grunted as he worked, trying to keep himself balanced against the wall on his one good leg. Archie ducked to keep away from the swarm and ran to Fergus. The tinker was taller than Archie, just like everybody else, but Archie was still able to hold him up. Fergus worked faster, disconnecting one hose and switching it out with another.

“There!” he said.

Smoke poured out of the ventilation shafts.

“You broke it!” Archie said, already starting to cough.

“No. I've seen beekeepers do this back home in the Carolina mountains. Smoke calms bees.”

“Hornets, sir,” Mr. Rivets said.

Hornets, wasps, bees—it didn't matter what they were. The smoke was working. The insects stopped attacking and hovered around Mr. Rivets, away from the smoky vents. The only problem was that Fergus was smoking himself and Archie and the girl out too.

“We can't breathe this smoke for too much longer,” Archie said, coughing. He looked out the front window and saw the familiar bloodred moon in the night sky. The
Hesperus
was up high enough that the rest of the hornets had fallen away!

Archie ran to a porthole and wrenched it open. The smoke and the hornets were sucked outside, replaced with the thin, frigid air of the upper atmosphere. The girl ran to Fergus and helped hold him up while he switched the pipes back to normal, and when the last of the smoke was gone Archie closed the porthole, slamming it shut so hard the glass cracked.

“We did it,” Archie said. He collapsed to the floor like a switched-off machine man, and Fergus and the girl flopped down beside him, absolutely exhausted.

“Smart thinking on the fire extinguisher,” Archie told the girl.

“Taking us up where it's cold was a brass notion,” Fergus told Archie.

“Pumping smoke in the cabin is what saved us,” the girl told Fergus.

“Those little clockwork gizmos of yours saved
me
,” Fergus said.

The girl whistled, and her circus flew back to their places in her bandolier.

“Shall I bring us down, Master Archie?” Mr. Rivets asked.

“No. Keep us up here for a while, just in case those wasps come after us again.”

“Hornets, sir.”

“How far d'ya think we'll have to go till that Swarm Queen can't send insects after us no more?” Fergus asked.

“I do not know, sir. The Swarm Queen's influence over the phylum
Arthropoda
means that as she gains strength, her mastery over insects everywhere will only become stronger.”

“Clinker,” Fergus muttered.

“I shall vent some heat in from the engines for you,” Mr. Rivets told them. “But at this altitude the cabin will still tend to be cold.”

“Whatever you can do, Mr. Rivets. Thank you,” said Archie.

“Might I also inquire, sir, where it is we're going? At present, we are holding station over Port Hibernum.”

Archie looked at the two other people shivering on the floor with him. Apart, they were weak, wounded, and alone. Together, they had stopped a mad scientist, survived a killer Tik Tok, and overcome a swarm of hornets. They were
good
together.

“I think we should go to New Rome,” Archie said. “All of us. Together.”

“I'm in,” Fergus said. “As long as we stop in Jersey first. I have to tell Mrs. Henhawk her husband is dead.”

Archie nodded. “What about you?” he asked the girl.

She stared at the floor for what seemed like an eternity, the only sound in the cabin the soft tick of Mr. Rivets' clockworks and the low drone of the
Hesperus'
twin DaVinci aeroprop engines.

“All right,” she said at last. “As long as we come back. With rayguns. Big ones.”

“We'll come back with an army,” Archie told her. “Mr. Rivets—New Rome. Best possible speed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Archie and the girl pulled each other up off the floor, then helped Fergus to stand.

“Hachi,” the girl said.

“What?—I don't—Is that a Seminole word?” Archie asked.

“It's my name,” said the girl. She climbed into one of the hammocks and turned to the wall to go to sleep.

“Is it me, or did we just make a new friend?” Fergus stage-whispered.

“Blow it out your blastpipe,” said Hachi from under her blanket.

Fergus winked at Archie, and they climbed into their hammocks to sleep.

*   *   *

Archie woke with a yelp. He was sweaty under his blanket despite the chill in the air.

“Master Archie?” Mr. Rivets asked from the steering console. “Is everything all right?”

“I just—I just had another dream about my parents.” He remembered bits and pieces of it—his parents, still controlled by those bugs in their necks, were in another brass room. A different brass room than before, without picture frames all over the walls.

Across the cabin, the dark shape of Fergus stirred in his hammock. “Archie?” he asked.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you.”

“Nae. It was—I had a dream. About these two people, a man and a woman. They had these … these insect things in the backs of their necks.”

Archie sat up. “Were they turning big knobs with letters on them?”

“Aye! And there were clockworks spinning behind them.”

Archie got goose bumps. He remembered the clockworks now. “And the floor. The floor was … moving somehow.”

“Aye! And there was this noise. A great booming sound from below.”

“Malacar Ahasherat. The Mangleborn. She's trying to get free. You saw my parents in the puzzle traps that keep people from getting to her. We just had the same dream! My parents are still alive. I told you. We have to get help. We have to rescue them!”

“But how is it possible for us to have the same dream?” Fergus asked.

“It's the Mangleborn. We must share some kind of connection with it.”

“That green fire,” Fergus said. “That flame Edison used on me. It came from that insect woman. I remember now. I could see her. A great big woman with bug eyes and grasshopper wings.”

“Yes! And bony arms and legs, like a mantis. I saw her when I reached in to grab you. Did she talk to you too?”

“Talk to me? Nae,” Fergus said. “She just sat there on that bridge like a throne, lording over a wasteland.”

Archie shrank back into his hammock. He was sure the Mangleborn had spoken. She had turned to look at him, said “Jandal a Haad” directly to him. But why hadn't Fergus heard it too? And if Fergus got his connection to the Mangleborn from the ritual on the stone altar, why had Archie dreamed of his parents
before
that, when Mr. Shinobi knocked him out? And how had he seen the big stone well and all the bugs underground before they'd even flown all the way to Florida?

“You're both crazy,” Hachi said, making Archie jump. He hadn't realized she was awake too. “Go back to sleep,” she told them. “We'll be in Jersey by morning.”

Archie turned over in his hammock and pulled his blanket up, wondering exactly how he could be connected to a Mangleborn buried in a swamp in Florida when he'd never set foot there before in his entire life.