The League of Seven (18 page)

Mr. Rivets straightened and whirred almost indignantly. He was a Mark II Machine Man.

“We're very happy with our Mark II,” said Archie.

“Thank you, sir,” Mr. Rivets said.

“Customer loyalty is a hallmark of the Emartha Locomotive and Machine Man Company,” Mr. Piston said. The elevator came to a stop, and he slid open its cage. “That is why so many owners choose to replace their obsolete machine men with newer models from the same foundry.”

Mr. Rivets waited for everyone else to leave the elevator before following a few steps behind.

The League's archives were in another long, tall corridor, though not nearly as long and as tall as the one below with the lektric generators. The room had been converted to a library decades ago, but despite the dedicated upkeep from half a dozen machine men—all Mark IVs, Archie noted with disappointment on Mr. Rivets' behalf—the place still smelled ancient and dusty.

“I think I remember this place,” Archie said. “I remember playing hide-and-seek with Mr. Rivets in the shelves while Mom and Dad looked things up in books.”

“Just so, sir,” Mr. Piston said.

Archie had never shared his parents' love of libraries. Just the sight of the stacks and the thousands of books cataloged here made him sag. If this was anything like the library back in Philadelphia, there would be books in here as old as Ancient Greece. A few might even hold secrets from old Atlantis. All they needed was for one or two to be about Malacar Ahasherat—to tell them how to stop her and get his parents back. But the thought of wading through all these books looking for answers made him tired already.

Mr. Piston brought them a stack of decomposing old tomes, and Archie and Hachi got to work, skimming through them for any reference they could find to the Swarm Queen. There were accounts of all manner of Mangleborn and Manglespawn, from giants with antlers the size of trees to lesser creatures with feathered arms and bodies like snakes.

“I can't believe all these things are real,” Hachi said, shutting a book.

Archie turned the next page of his book and froze. There in an illustration was Malacar Ahasherat, the Swarm Queen, fighting a hulking First Nations man wrapped in a bearskin.

“I found her,” Archie said, and Hachi came around to read with him.

The man in the picture was the Great Bear, a member of some former League of Seven, one of the superheroes who had come together to save their world from the Mangleborn once again. He had been a mighty champion of the Mi'kmaq, a First Nations tribe in Acadia.

“‘After six did fall in battle, only the Great Bear, his pelt impervious to every weapon, remained,'” Hachi read aloud. “‘Thence it was that the Great Bear alone, he with the strength of a hundred men, came to defeat the Queen of Swarms, the last of the ancient monsters called the Mangleborn.' But it doesn't say
how
,” Hachi said. She flipped forward and back in the book, looking for answers.

“‘His pelt impervious to every weapon,'” Archie said. “That bearskin he's wearing. It must have protected him. If we had that pelt, we would be protected too.”

Hachi pulled another book to her. “I saw something else about the Great Bear in this one.”

Archie read the rest of the entry about Malacar Ahasherat in Plutarch's
Seven Lives of the Mangleborn
while Hachi flipped back through her book. There wasn't much more except descriptions of all the plagues and disasters the Swarm Queen had caused. “‘The monster, like its cousins the insects, is attracted to the light of the full moon and draws strength from its pull,'” Archie read aloud. “Mr. Rivets, when is the next full moon?”

“I'm afraid I don't have that information, sir,” Mr. Rivets said. “Perhaps one of the Mark IVs will have the answer encoded on his shiny new aluminum memory cards.”

If Archie didn't know it was beyond his programming, he would have thought Mr. Rivets was being a little snippy.

“Here,” Hachi said. “It says the pelt was buried with him. The bearskin and his club. ‘In the mouth of the great bear.'” She looked up. “The Great Bear was buried in the mouth of the Great Bear? How does that work?”

“I don't know. Does it say where he's buried?”

“What, now we're going to rob a grave?”

“If that's what it takes to beat this Mangleborn and get my parents back, yes!”

“Archie, it's just a story,” Hachi told him. “One of your half-truths, like Atlantis. There's no such thing as bearskins that weapons can't pierce, or people with the strength of a hundred men. It's just mythology. Tall tales. Some guy was strong, and a thousand years later people remember him being some kind of superman.”

“You mean like mole monsters that can see through other people's eyes? Or ichor of lektric squid turning Fergus into a computing machine?” Archie stood. “Why do you have to be like that? Why do you have to deny everything, even when you can see it with your own eyes? You told me my parents were dead when you knew they weren't. You saw them, didn't you? In a dream, just like I did! Just like Fergus did!”

“All right,” Hachi said, standing to face him. “Your parents might not be dead.
Yet
. But they will be. You can't go down there with that thing and live. Nothing can. You heard it beating on the seal. It's going to get out. Nobody's safe. Not even aboveground. They're dead, we're dead—everybody's
dead
.”

“Then what were you doing there? In Florida?”

“I was going to kill Edison. And then I was going to kill that thing that lives underground.”

“How, exactly?”

“I had a plan, okay? A plan you ruined.”

“Then why don't you just go do it yourself then, if you have all the answers?”

“Maybe I will!”

Hachi crossed her arms and turned away. Archie slapped his book closed. Behind him, Mr. Piston emerged from a row of bookshelves, his stovepipe hat puffing.

“Mr. Piston, I need more books about the Mi'kmaq hero called the Great Bear,” Archie said. That pelt had protected the Great Bear from Malacar Ahasherat once, and Archie wanted it.

Mr. Piston didn't answer. Instead he played “Mister Twister, the Melancholy Machine Man” as he had in the elevator. Hachi turned to look at him.

“Mr. Piston?” Archie said.

The machine man kept walking toward them without a word. Archie heard Hachi draw her dagger.

“Hachi, what're you—?” Archie began. Then he saw Mr. Piston's eyes.

The machine man's eyes were red.

“Run!” Hachi said. She threw her chair at Mr. Piston's legs, but the Tik Tok stomped it to splinters under his steam-driven feet. Archie was barely up out of his chair before Hachi slipped under the table and overturned it, scattering the tomes they had just been reading. The researcher's son in Archie flinched at the books being tossed about, but when Mr. Piston's whirling arms smashed right through the table he decided he didn't care so much and ran.

“I don't understand what's happened to them! They're not allowed to hurt humans. It's the first law of Tik Toks,” he cried.

“That meka-ninja didn't seem to be too worried about any laws,” Hachi yelled as they ran.

“But these are different! They're Emartha Machine Man Tik Toks!”

“Yes, the irony hadn't escaped me,” Hachi said. Archie didn't understand what she meant by that, but there was no time to ask. Another machine man with red eyes came out of the stacks ahead of them and turned, his arms windmilling. He too was playing “Mister Twister, the Melancholy Machine Man”—
DING-ding-DING-ding-DING-ding-DING-ding.

Hachi ducked and slid along the floor, just missing the arms of death spinning above her.
Shink. Pfft!
She snipped a pressurized rubber hose at the back of the Tik Tok's leg and it toppled, unable to stand.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
The machine man's arms kept spinning, pounding the stone floor like a paddle wheel.

“I'm glad Fergus wasn't here to see that,” Archie said.

Their path to the exit was blocked by the thrashing Tik Tok. Hachi pushed Archie down one of the rows of books instead.

“Not you, Mr. Rivets,” she told their machine man. “You take the next aisle.”

“As you say, miss,” Mr. Rivets said.

Archie didn't see the point in running this way—they were headed
away
from the door. Things only got worse when a red-eyed machine man playing “Mister Twister, the Melancholy Machine Man” turned down the far end of their row and Mr. Piston appeared at the other end, playing the tune in stereo.

DING-ding-DING-ding-DING-ding-DING-ding
.

“We're trapped!” Archie said.

“No we're not,” Hachi told him.

Archie didn't see how both exits being blocked wasn't trapped. And all Hachi was doing was standing there, watching the Tik Toks get closer.

“Now—climb!” she told him. She jumped onto the shelves and started up. Books rained down as she climbed, making Archie wince again. His parents would be distraught.

“Climb!” Hachi called down. She was already halfway to the top. Archie grabbed a shelf and hauled himself up unsteadily as the machine men drew nearer. Mr. Piston's arms sliced the air near him—
whht-whht-whht-whht
—and Archie slipped, his foot breaking a shelf in half. Books slid off it and exploded in Mr. Piston's whirling arms.

Hachi grabbed the back of Archie's jacket and helped pull him the rest of the way up. Below, the spinning arms of the evil machine men chewed up the shelves.

“Mr. Rivets!” Hachi called. “Push it over!”

The next aisle over, Mr. Rivets put his metal shoulder into the shelf they were on and pushed. The bookshelf swayed under Archie.

“Jump!” Hachi told him. She leaped to the bookcase across the aisle as Mr. Rivets tipped theirs over. Archie stood shakily, tried to steady himself, and jumped. He hit the other bookcase stomach first with an
oof
. Hachi grabbed his jacket and held on as the bookcase behind him slammed down—
boom!—
burying the red-eyed Tik Toks under an avalanche of books and shelves. A decades-old cloud of dust poofed up from the wreckage as Archie scrambled the rest of the way up onto the top of the bookshelf.

“A little warning next time,” Archie told Hachi.

In the silence that followed the boom, “Mister Twister, the Melancholy Machine Man” still played faintly from beneath the debris of the wrecked bookshelves.

“I believe my obsolete mainspring proved to have sufficient torque, wouldn't you say, Master Archie?” Mr. Rivets said from the next aisle over.

“Without a doubt, Mr. Rivets,” Archie told him.

Hachi started off down the top of the shelves toward the exit, but Archie called to her to wait. He climbed down onto the mountain of debris below and yanked Mr. Piston's talent card from his back. The machine man stopped thrashing and playing music.

“Someone's tampered with it,” Archie said, holding the talent card up for Mr. Rivets to see. There were new holes punched into the metal—crudely done, but clever enough to override the Tik Toks' fail-safes and make them act out their sinister new orders.

“Who would know how to do this?” Archie asked.

“I think the question is, who's the only other person here with us?” said Hachi.

“You don't mean Tesla!” Archie said.

Another machine man turned down the aisle, “Mister Twister, the Melancholy Machine Man” tinkling merrily from his internal speaking trumpets.

Hachi drew her knife again. “Let's go ask him,” she said.

 

18

“Come on come on come on,” Archie said to the elevator. Fergus was down there, alone, with Tesla. There was no telling what the man was doing to him.

“Would it help if I hummed ‘Mister Twister, the Melancholy Machine Man' while we wait?” Mr. Rivets asked.

“No,” Archie and Hachi said together.

“Very good,” said Mr. Rivets.

The elevator hit the bottom floor, and Archie and Hachi rushed out. Down below, in the water tank Tesla had turned into a workspace, Fergus lay flat on a table. His shirt was off and wires stuck out of him all over his body. Tesla and one of the Mark IV machine men stood over him with pliers and screwdrivers in their hands.

“Fergus!” Archie cried.

Hachi slid down the ladder like a sailor, her feet wrapped around the sides. Afraid he would kill himself if he tried the same thing, Archie hurried down the usual way, one rung at a time. Mr. Rivets followed.

“Get away from him,” Hachi told Tesla, her voice raspy and hard at the same time.

Tesla looked up, blinking behind the metal cage he wore on his head. “What? Why?”

Fergus sat up too, making Archie jump. Fergus' bare chest was a maze of black lines, just like his face and arms.