The Dragon Lantern Read online

  “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 n
ot 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.

  “Whoa! Was that a flying girl?” Clyde asked, his voice booming through the amplified trumpet inside Buster. The giant steam man hopped after Sings-In-The-Night, barking at her with his whistle, until Clyde got him to heel. Buster bent down close to Archie and opened his mouth, and Archie climbed inside.

  “Check it out!” Clyde said, gesturing at the repaired left eye. “The Tik Toks fixed him up! Repaired his eye, put in new pedals for me—said they made some upgrades to his engine room too.”

  “Yeah. They ‘upgraded’ Mr. Rivets too,” Archie told him.

  “So, we ready to make tracks?” Clyde asked. “Like Mrs. DeMarcus says, there’s no time like the present, and no present like time.”

  Archie knew they needed to get underway. The fox girl had a head start on them to Cheyenne—if her airship didn’t get caught in a cyclone first. But he wanted Sings-In-The-Night with them. She was supposed to be part of their League. He was sure of it. Even if the League she’d been created for was gone now, even if the way she had been created was awful and horrible and wrong, this was right. This was what she was made for.

  It was what Archie was made for too.

  * * *

  Buster’s whistling woke Archie the next morning, and Clyde called him up to the bridge. Sings-In-The-Night was outside, flapping her black wings to stay level with Buster’s eyes. Clyde opened one of the windows, and she spoke to them through it.

  “I’ll come,” she said. “I’m not sure I can join your League, not after everything that’s happened, but there’s no life for me here. And I don’t want anyone else hurt by the lantern.”

  She turned and flew off in the direction of the Moving City of Cheyenne. Archie saw a smudge of black on her shirt and realized she must have spent the night in the burned-out ruins of Beaver Run, surrounded by ghosts.

  18

  New Orleans was having a party.

  All along Canal Street, a row of colorful airship balloons bumped and bobbed into each other. Some of the balloons were shaped into long faces—a crocodile, a jester, a ghost—but most were just decorated in gaudy splashes of purple and green and gold. It was what hung below them that really mattered. In the place of airship capsules and cabins, each balloon carried what parade-goers called “floats”—long, open-topped barges in even more bizarre shapes than the balloons. One, Hachi could see, was made to look like a steamboat. Another was a mermaid with a trumpet, emerging from majestic blue waves. Another, in the shape of a stick with a net at the end, paid tribute to New Orleans’s celebrated lacrosse team, the Saints. On the floats stood armies of costumed revelers throwing necklaces and charms to the huge crowds swarming the sidewalks.

  “Is this what Mardi Gras is like?” Hachi asked.

  “Dis is bigger dan Mardi Gras,” Erasmus Trudeau told her. The Pinkerton agent swung their tiny airship around, and Hachi saw the masses of people filling the side streets, all dancing and singing and drinking. “It’s dat Baron Samedi. He put everybody in a party mood.”

  Everyone but Hachi. She was feeling distinctly unparty-like. She had just watched Madame Blavatsky be “ridden” by the loa of Baron Samedi right when she was about to get her hands on her. Now, instead of interrogating Blavatsky in some hidden garret, she was getting ready to drop in on a parade float to give Blavatsky an impromptu haircut.

  “A true bokor can welcome a loa as easily as she can expel one,” Marie Laveau had told them as they left the palace after the séance. “But Blavatsky is no true bokor. Without the knowledge or the strength to push him out, Samedi can ride her until she dies. And will.”

  What they needed, Laveau told them, was a voodoo doll of Blavatsky. And to make a voodoo doll of Blavatsky, they needed a lock of her hair.

  “We just coming around now, Miss Hachi,” Erasmus said.

  Hachi clipped a carabiner to the harness she wore and opened the bottom hatch on the little airship.

  “You got your barber’s shears?” Erasmus asked, laughing.

  Hachi patted her knife. “Something like that.”

  “Den good luck—and good cutting!”

  Hachi jumped out of the airship, the rope attached to her harness buzzing as it ran out of the airship’s winch. She shot down past a long, tall balloon in the shape of a rampant bull, and as the winch slowed her descent, she swung onto the deck of a float decorated with empty-eyed skeleton skulls. A zombi soldier turned at the sound of her landing, and she kicked him in the chest, knocking him over into the cheering, singing crowd below.

  The float was like a long sailing ship, with a wooden plank floor and short walls at the sides. A network of ropes held its balloon in place above, and more ropes stretched from the prow and the stern to the porters on the street below who pulled it along the parade route. All along the low walls, men and women in skeleton costumes threw baubles to the crowd below, ignoring her.

  Hachi gave the rope on her harness a quick tug to let Erasmus know she’d landed, and she felt it go slack. Two more tugs, and Erasmus would throw a lever on the winch, whipping her back up.

  “Circus, showtime,” Hachi said. From her bandolier flew the three remaining wind-up animals her father had built for her before he’d died. Each time she saw them, she was filled with a mix of emotions, ranging from happiness and comfort to sadness and loss. “You know what to do,” she told the little gorilla, lion, and giraffe, and they buzzed off into the chaos.

  Hachi slipped up behind one of the revelers and put a chloroform rag to her face. “Sorry,” she said as the young woman slumped in her arms. One of the other costumed partiers looked over. Hachi smiled and shrugged. “Too much to drink,” she said. She pulled the woman away and quickly stole her costume, mask, and basket of charms. Looking just like the rest of the revelers, Hachi made her way toward the front of the float, where Baron Samedi, still riding Helena Blavatsky, waved to the crowd.

  Blavatsky had changed. Not like Marie Laveau changed, not physically. She still looked like Madame Blavatsky, but now she wore a black tuxedo, a black top hat, and round black tinted glas
ses. She smoked a cigar all the time now too—and in her other hand she carried a bottle of rum. Baron Samedi was making up for lost time.

  Drink up, Hachi thought. Playtime’s almost over.

  Hachi threw trinkets to the crowd as she moved up the float, pretending to be just another of the revelers. Samedi still had his back turned toward her. Hachi was almost to him when she saw Queen Theodosia sitting in a gilded throne near the prow.

  “Your Highness,” Hachi whispered. “Your Highness, what are you doing here?”

  Queen Theodosia stared straight ahead, as though she was mesmerized. Hachi waved a hand in front of her face and snapped her fingers, but Theodosia didn’t budge. Baron Samedi must have put her under some sort of spell. Hachi looked up and was surprised to see the decrepit General Jackson standing behind her. Why hadn’t the general defended her against Samedi? Then Hachi remembered: Baron Samedi was the loa of resurrection. No matter who had made them, all zombis answered to Samedi.

  Hachi left Theodosia behind. The best way to save her was to get rid of Baron Samedi, and the best way to get rid of him was to get a lock of Blavatsky’s hair for Laveau’s voodoo doll.

  Focus, Hachi, she told herself.

  She picked up her mantra where she’d left off the last time and creped forward, her knife in her hand.

  Hahyah Yechee, the sheriff.

  Thomas Stidham, the horse breeder.

  Arkon Nichee, friend to many.

  One hundred men.

  Claiborne Lowe, twelve times a grandfather.

  Pompey Yoholo, seventh son of a seventh son.

  Woxe Holatha, the banker.

  One hundred murdered souls, and only Helena Blavatsky knew why they’d been killed. Hachi brought her knife up to the back of Blavatsky’s head and held it there. Blavatsky’s white neck called out to her to be cut, and Hachi put a hand to the long scar at her own throat. One pull of the knife, and it would be over—Blavatsky would be dead, and her father would be avenged.

  But no—Hachi had to know why she’d done it. And she had to get the names of the others too, the ones who’d been at Chuluota with Blavatsky. Her father and the ninety-nine other men who’d been murdered would never be avenged until the last of their killers rotted six feet underground.