The Dragon Lantern (39 page)

“No—no! It can't be!”

Archie looked up to see Sings-In-The-Night swooping down out of the sky, the high bright Paiute sun glinting off her beautiful black wings. Sings-In-The-Night wasn't dead. She was alive! Archie felt his heart glow as Sings-In-The-Night descended like some glorious savior from on high, a heavenly creature come to grant him forgiveness and wipe away the sins done in his name.

“No—no, I killed you!” Mrs. Moffett cried, backing away.

Sings-In-The-Night hit Mrs. Moffett feetfirst, knocking her to the ground. She perched on top of Mrs. Moffett, wings wide, while her old friend tried to scrabble away in horror.

Archie reached for her. “Sings…,” he said, his throat dusty and sore.

And then Archie was being picked up, lifted by a great brass hand. Buster! The steam man stuffed Archie into his mouth and turned to run away.

“No,” Archie said, thrown around the captain's quarters. “No—no, wait!” He scrambled up the ladder to the bridge and grabbed Clyde's arm. “No, we have to go back!”

“Are you crazy?” Clyde said. One of Mrs. Moffett's sonic screams caught them, and Buster lurched forward, almost falling over. Clyde steered Buster out of its path, running as fast as he could.

“Clyde, we have to go back! Sings-In-The-Night was there! She's alive! I saw her!” Archie pulled on Buster's controls, wrenching them back.

“Archie—Archie! It was Kitsune!” Clyde said. “It was just an illusion to distract Mrs. Moffett so we could get you out of there. It was just Kitsune!”

Clyde pointed, and Archie saw Kitsune hopping up the length of Buster's arm to climb into the top hatch.

Clyde grabbed Archie's arm and shook it. “She's dead, Archie,” Clyde told him. “I'm sorry, but Sings-In-The-Night really is dead.”

Archie sank to the floor. Of course she was. And all Archie wanted was to be dead with her.

35

Clyde banged on something with a wrench, his blue-and-yellow UN Steam Cavalry pants and black boots sticking out from under a bundle of hissing pipes in Buster's belly. Kitsune perched high up on top of a water tank, studying a map.

Archie sat in the shadows, where he belonged.

Archie had been carved out of stone and soaked in blood, and now he had the strength of a hundred men. A hundred men who had been killed to create him. A hundred men, including Hachi's father, Hololkee Emartha. No matter what he did with his life, no matter what kind of hero he became, he could never repay that sacrifice.

“Twisted pistons!” Clyde called. “I can't get this thingamajig to go back in the whatchamadoodle. Unless it goes in this doohickey…”

“Sounds very technical,” Kitsune said.

“Perhaps a break is in order, Master Clyde,” Mr. Rivets said. He came into the tight engineering space bearing a military-grade tea service and three metal mugs. Kitsune hung upside down from a pipe to grab her cup, and Clyde wormed his way out and took his, mopping his brow with a yellow handkerchief.

“Thanks, Mr. R. This hits the spot,” Clyde said.

Mr. Rivets offered Archie a cup. “Master Archie?”

Archie shook his head.

“You have to have something to eat and drink sometime,” Mr. Rivets said.

“No, I
don't,
” Archie said. “That's the point, isn't it? I don't need air to breathe, and I don't need food to eat or water to drink.
I'm not a real boy.
I never was. I really
am
a shadow. I'm a dark, crooked thing that looks like a person, that moves like a person, but when you put your hand out to touch it, there's nothing really there.”

“Well,” said Clyde, “Mrs. DeMarcus used to say you can't have a shadow without a little light.”

“Will you shut up about Mrs. DeMarcus?”
Archie spat.

Clyde folded his arms and looked down at the metal gangplank at their feet, and Archie immediately regretted his words. But slag it, this wasn't something he could just whitewash with one of Clyde's homilies. He was a
monster
. An honest-to-goodness horror. He saw now why he could never be the leader of the League of Seven—not with a history like his. When he came right down to it, Archie wasn't sure he could even be the League's shadow anymore. He was too awful even for that.

“Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said. “There's no reason to be rude.”

There was every reason to be rude. To everyone. Forever. But Archie couldn't disappoint Mr. Rivets. “I'm sorry,” he told Clyde. “I just—I don't think there's anything you could say that would help.”

“If you don't want to hear it from Mrs. DeMarcus, then hear it from me, Archie,” Clyde told him. “We need you. I know all this business about how you were made is awful—I ain't saying it isn't. I don't know if I could deal with it myself, and that's a fact. But the bigger fact is that you're the only one of us who can go toe-to-toe with Philomena Moffett, and she's brewing up a mess of trouble. Without you, she beats all the rest of us put together—me, Buster, Kitsune, your two friends back in Houston—and she makes monsters out of half the continent. You got powers, Archie.
Super
powers. And you gotta use them to stop her.”

“But I'm not even strong enough to beat her!” Archie said. “We fought to a standstill every time!”

“Which is why you've got the rest of us,” Clyde said. “The people of the United Nations—of all the nations—they need somebody out there protecting them from Mrs. Moffett and the Mangleborn, and me and Buster are volunteering for duty. We can stop her, but we gotta have all hands on deck. The whole team. What about you, Kitsune?”

“
I'm
not volunteering. But I'm in,” Kitsune said. She put a hand to her pearl necklace and glanced at Archie. “I got shanghaied.”

“All right,” Clyde said. He stuffed his handkerchief in his back pocket. “Buster needs repairs. Repairs I can't do. I'm a soldier, not an engineer, dang it. I wish we had your tinker friend here right now, but we don't. So I gotta put in someplace with a machine shop. You got me a place yet?” he asked Kitsune.

She handed the map down to him. “Ute town called Wasatch. I've been there. It's nice. The bank backs right up onto the railroad tracks. Makes for an easy getaway.”

“Well, we'll be coming and going through the front door this time,” Clyde said.

Kitsune shrugged and grinned, wrapping her fox tail around her legs.

“So here's the plan,” Clyde said. “Me and Kitsune will take Buster to Wasatch for repairs. Archie, you and Mr. R. will catch a train south to Houston. Find your friends.”

Archie opened his mouth to say something, but let it go. He had to admit, Clyde really was a natural-born leader. Archie wanted nothing more than to crawl into a corner and hide there for the rest of his life, but he couldn't say no to Clyde. To the League.

“Me and Kitsune will be right on your heels,” Clyde said. “Once we're all together, we'll go after Mrs. Moffett as a team. Stop her before she destroys the United Nations. There's only five of us, not seven, but that'll have to do.”

The engine room rocked, and something slammed against the hull.
Clang-clang-clang-clang!

Clyde rapped on one of the pipes with his wrench. “Stop scratching, you big oaf!” he yelled at the steam man. “You don't have fleas anymore! You're made of metal!”

Buster whistled happily to hear Clyde's voice, and Clyde shook his head. “Dumb thing. Doesn't even realize he's not a dog anymore.”

And that was it, Archie realized. He was Buster. He was a golem who was pretending to be human, just like Buster was a steam man pretending to be a dog. No, not pretending—fooling themselves. Everyone else could see what they really were on the outside. He and the dog were ghosts in the machine, but that's all they really were—machines.

“I'm going up top,” Clyde said. “Get us going to Wasatch.” Kitsune hopped down off the water tank to join him. “You coming?” Clyde asked Archie.

“In a minute,” Archie told him.

Clyde nodded. He climbed halfway up a ladder and stopped. “For what it's worth, Archie, I've seen what kind of monsters there really are out there, and you're not nearly the worst of them.”

Clyde and Kitsune left Archie and Mr. Rivets alone in the engine room. Within minutes, the machinery around them came to life as Buster steamed south, toward Wasatch. Toward Hachi and Fergus.

Hachi and Fergus.
Archie buried his head in his hands. “I know I have to do this, Mr. Rivets. I know I have to find Hachi and Fergus, go after Mrs. Moffett. But how am I going to tell them? What am I going to say? How are they still going to be my friends when I tell them where I came from? How I was made?”

Mr. Rivets put a hand on Archie's shoulder. “They can hardly blame you, sir. You had nothing to do with it.”

“But it had everything to do with me, Mr. Rivets.”

“I'm sure Master Fergus will understand,” Mr. Rivets told him.

“And Hachi?”

“Miss Hachi will be all right too,” Mr. Rivets said.

Archie stared up at him.

“… in time,” Mr. Rivets added.

*   *   *

“I will never be all right, ever again,” Hachi said.

Fergus crossed Hachi's hotel room to the bed, where she was hastily stuffing her clothes into a satchel.

“Okay,” Fergus said. “So ‘Are you all right?' wasn't the smartest question I've ever asked. Of course you're not. But you can't just go steaming out of here without telling me where you're going.”

“You know where I'm going,” Hachi told him. “I have a list. People to track down. Erasmus has already sent out pneumatigrams to Pinkerton agencies across the continent. I'm going to track down the other people who were with Blavatsky that night, and I'm going to kill them. As slowly and as painfully as I can.”

Fergus put a hand to her shoulder and she flinched, batting it away with one hand and drawing her knife with the other. Fergus put his hands up in surrender, and she sheepishly put the knife back away.

“You're going to have to deal with this eventually,” Fergus told her.

“I am dealing with it,” she said. “I told you—I'm going to track them down and kill them—”

“That's not what I mean, and you know it.”

Hachi stared at her bag. “Not yet,” she said.

“Then when?” Fergus said. “We told him we'd meet him—”

“No.”

“He's still our friend,” Fergus said. “It's not his fault he—”

“No,”
Hachi said. She zipped up the bag, threw it over her shoulder, and turned toward the door. Fergus put a hand to her arm again, but this time she didn't flinch. Instead she just closed her eyes.

“I'll come with you, then,” Fergus said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The things I'm going to do—the things I
have
to do—I don't want you to see them.”

“What? Crivens. I'm a big boy, Hachi. I can handle—”

“No,” Hachi said. “You don't understand. I don't want you to see
me
do them.”

Fergus hadn't expected her to say that. Hachi prided herself on her toughness. She wore it like a raygun on her hip, for everyone to be afraid of.

“Hachi, I love you,” Fergus said.

She batted his hand away. “I don't want you to love me! I have a job to do, and I don't have a place in my life for anything else! I have to kill the people who killed my father. Who killed ninety-nine other men at Chuluota. All so that—all so that—”

Fergus pulled her into a hug, and she sobbed into his shoulder.

“I know,” he said softly. “I know.” He let her cry until she had cried herself out, and still Fergus knew it wouldn't be enough. She had had eleven years to cry every last tear she had for her father and the other ninety-nine men who died at Chuluota, but she was just getting started crying over Archie.

“Go on without me, then,” Fergus said. “I slipped one of those beeping homing beacon things I hate so much in your bandolier. When you're … when you're finished, you turn that on, and I'll find you. We'll find each other.”

Hachi nodded into Fergus's chest, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and was gone out the door.

*   *   *

The little Cheyenne steamburb of Medicine Bow had stopped at the junction depot it shared with the Transcontinental Railroad and was just settling in for the night. Gaslights glowed in the teepee-shaped houses up and down its seven stories like jars full of fireflies stacked on shelves. Nearby, the herds of buffalo the town tended slept in great brown-black piles against one another.

The sound of a train in the distance was so familiar, neither herd nor town stirred. Only the stationmaster, frowning at the railroad timetable that listed no trains due to arrive until early the next morning, was there to meet the locomotive as it pulled into the station. The train hauled but one passenger car, and even more mysteriously, no porters or engineers or passengers climbed out when it stopped.