The Dragon Lantern (19 page)

“What?”
Archie said. That was news to him!

“Repair and upgrade records … regular maintenance schedule…,” Urika went on, “and here's a special note at the end.” Urika's eyes went wide behind his glasses, and he pushed them higher on his nose. “By Umohoti!”

“What? What is it?” Archie asked.

“Mr. Dent! You should have said that you were a Panther-level member when you came in!” Urika hurried around the counter to shake Archie's hand. “We'll see to your machine man's repairs at once. At once! Mr. Cylinder, please escort Mr. Rivets to the repair shop, and tell Mr. Mimiteh to clear all other jobs until this machine man is in
perfect
working order.”

“Th-thanks,” Archie said, not sure why he and Mr. Rivets were suddenly receiving so much attention.

“I believe there must be some mistake,” Mr. Rivets said. To Archie, he said, “Emartha Machine Man customers are divided into ranked categories, depending on what level of service contract they choose. The categories are named, as I understand it, for the eight traditional clans of the Seminole Nation, the tribe of the Maker. Our previous service contract was merely Otter level. How the Dents can now afford the most elite level I don't understand.…”

But Archie did.
Hachi
. She was now the head of the Emartha Machine Man Company, whether she wanted to be or not. She must have told someone to make the Dents and Mr. Rivets Panther-level customers for life.

“No, no,” Urika said. “No mistake at all. Mr. Cylinder?”

Mr. Cylinder took Mr. Rivets by the hand to lead him into the back.

“You're going to be all right, Mr. Rivets,” Archie said, suddenly nervous for him.

“Of course I am,” Mr. Rivets said. “The Emartha Machine Man Company is notorious for the high quality of its service and repair.”

“Right. Just … I'll see you soon,” Archie said. There almost wasn't a time in his life when Mr. Rivets hadn't been at Archie's side, or at least very nearby waiting for him to return. The thought of him going away, even for a short time, made Archie feel hollow inside.

“We will have him back to you in no time, and in tip-top condition,” Urika assured Archie. “In the meantime, let me get you a loaner machine man—”

“No!” Archie said. He'd said it more forcefully than he meant to, so much that it startled Mr. Urika. “I mean, no thanks,” Archie said. “I'll just wait for Mr. Rivets.”

Urika assured them Mr. Rivets would be all fixed up by the next morning, and Archie and Clyde went back out into the street.

“Man, that guy was tripping over himself to help you,” Clyde said. “You and your family must be pretty important folks, and that's a fact.”

“We're not really,” Archie told him. “I just know the owner really well.”

“So now what?” Clyde asked.

“This was the closest town. Unless the fox girl had a lot of supplies with her, she'd have to stop here,” Archie said.

“Unless this
is
her stop,” Clyde said.

“Maybe. But I feel like it's not. Like, she's headed somewhere else.”

“She's Asian. Maybe she's headed for the West Coast. Isn't there a Japanese colony up there?”

Archie nodded. “If this isn't where she was headed, she'll be looking for transportation out of town. She can't cross the continent on a steam mule. It'd take too long.”

“So let's check the stations,” Clyde said. “We got the time.”

The train station was a bust. None of the station agents had seen a girl dressed up as a fox, of course, and they had seen nothing else amiss. Morning trains to Kansa City, Shikaakwa, and Cahokia on the Plains had already left, and the next train to the Moving City of Cheyenne didn't leave until that evening.

“If she's headed into Sioux territory, we're in trouble,” Clyde said. “We take Buster in there, and we really
will
have motherwheels after us.”

“So will she,” Archie said. “No. I think she's headed farther west, like you said. Come on. Let's check the airfields.”

It was practically suicide to travel the plains by balloon in tornado season. It had always been bad on the plains in the summer, but it got worse when the Darkness fell. Cyclones wandered the Great Plains like living things, eating up houses and trees and buffalo. And airships. But just because it was dangerous didn't mean people didn't try. Like the blue-and-gray dirigible they saw being loaded for a flight to the Moving City of Cheyenne at Blackbird Air Park. Its name was
Bear on the Wind
. It looked like an old Apache Air DC-3, retrofitted with later-model Tecumseh aeroprops and weighted down for extra control in choppy weather. It was bigger than Archie's family airship, the
Hesperus
, but smaller than the massive Apache Air Liners that had replaced it. Between crew and passengers, it could probably carry no more than twenty people comfortably.

“Is that airship really going to try to make it to Cheyenne?” Clyde asked the gate agent.

The old Omaha nodded. “Always some crazy pilot fool enough to try it, and some crazy fool passengers desperate enough to take him up on it.”

Archie watched the passengers boarding. They were all First Nations, most of them Omaha. A young woman in a brown coat and brown hat, a middle-aged man in a black suit and tie, a fat man wearing a white shirt, black vest, and a colorful square-patterned blanket for a skirt.…

The fat man. There was something not right about him. Archie could feel it. But what was it? His eyes raked the man from top to bottom, bottom to top. What was he seeing that he wasn't seeing?

Archie grabbed Clyde. “His shadow! Look at that man's shadow!”

The fat man had the shadow of a small girl with pointed ears and the tail of a fox.

The fat man saw Archie pointing, looked at his shadow, and it suddenly changed to match him. It was the fox girl! Archie had seen her shadow! Archie tried to push through the gate to get to her, but the gate agent stopped him.

“That man—the Omaha with the blanket for a skirt,” Archie cried. “He's not a man! He's a girl! I mean,
she's
a girl, and she's a thief!”

“You're as crazy as the rest of 'em,” the gate agent said. “That man there's a respectable businessman. Paid me cash for his ticket.”

The old man held up a small handful of newspaper, cut to the size of Pawnee money, and gaped at it. He'd clearly thought he was holding a wad of real cash.

“Here, wait!” he cried. “Stop that man!”

It was too late. The door to the airship closed, and the
Bear on the Wind
lifted away.

“We have to catch that airship!” Archie told Clyde.

“I got just the thing,” Clyde said. He put his fingers in his mouth and blew a piercing whistle. “Buster!” he yelled. “Here boy!”

“He can't hear you this far away,” Archie said. But muffled cries rose up with a flock of birds on the other side of town, and the big brass head of Buster the steam man lifted up over the rooftops.

“Here boy!” Clyde called again. “Buster, come!”

Buster stood to his full ten-story height, towering over even the tallest rooftop in the city. In a few loping, thundering strides Buster was on top of them, bending down to “lick” Clyde. The gate agent squeaked and fell back on his butt.

“Good dog!” Clyde told Buster. “Good boy! Now let us inside.”

Buster opened his mouth, and Clyde hopped into the small room that had once been Custer's cabin. “Come on, Archie!”

Archie climbed in with far less grace and followed Clyde up the ladder to the bridge as Buster stood again to his full height. The airship rose to Buster's eye level right outside and turned away.

“Oh no you don't!” Clyde said. He slipped into the control chair, told Buster to heel, and grabbed the little cabin that hung beneath the
Bear on the Wind
's gas balloon with the steam man's giant hand. The airship bobbled like a child's balloon, but Buster held on tight. The passengers inside watched out the windows of the airship cabin with wonder, horror, and surprise. Buster barked with his whistle, scaring most of them away from the windows.

Clyde talked into a speaking trumpet near his head, his voice booming outside. “We're not letting you leave with the fat man!”

“He may not be a fat man anymore,” Archie told him. “I mean,
she
might not be a fat man anymore.”

“Only he might not be a fat man anymore,” Clyde said through the speaking trumpet.

Below them, somewhere on the ground, an alarm rang out.

“What's that?” Clyde said. Buster's head turned. Far below them, smoke rose from a building, and bricks and debris were scattered in the street, as though it had exploded. “It looks like a bank robbery!” Clyde said. “See if you can magnify the window.”

“It doesn't matter!” Archie said. “We have to bring that airship down!”

Click-click-click
—the magnifying lenses fell into place. Buster must have done it somehow, because it wasn't Archie. Through the window, larger than life, they saw a Tik Tok unlike any machine man Archie had ever seen before. He was tall and thin and made of brass like Mr. Rivets, but he looked more human. His arms and legs were human-proportioned, his chest was flatter and less round, and his face—his face was still riveted, but it looked like a man's face, not the stylized, almost cartoony faces of the Mark II and Mark IV Machine Men. And he wore clothes! Not brass, bolted-on imitation clothes like Mr. Rivets, but real cloth clothes—brown leather pants, a white shirt, a long black jacket, and a brown cowboy hat.

In his hand, this extraordinary Tik Tok held a raygun, and he was pointing it at
people
, even though machine men were programmed not to hurt humans.

Clyde gasped. “Jesse James!”

“Who?” Archie asked.

“The FreeTok outlaw, Jesse James! Custer's chased him for years!”

A FreeTok! Mr. Rivets had told Archie about FreeToks. They were Self-Determinalists—machine men who refused to do the work they were programmed for and ran away to live in their own cities. Why this one was robbing a bank in Ton won tonga, Archie didn't know, and he didn't care.

“We don't have time to stop a bank robber,” Archie said.

“But that's not a bank,” Clyde said. “It's the Emartha Machine Man store! Jesse James doesn't steal money—he steals Tik Toks! Archie, Jesse James just stole Mr. Rivets!”

15

“Welcome, seekers,” Madame Blavatsky said. “Welcome … to the spirit realm.”

“Should we hold hands?” Fergus asked.

“Not yet,” Blavatsky said.

Helena Blavatsky sat to the right of Hachi, eyes flickering in the light from a group of candles in the center of the table. Candles, but no candelabra, Hachi was amused to notice. To her left was Fergus, surreptitiously studying the table and chairs for the mechanical devices he was sure Blavatsky would use to pretend to contact the “spirit realm.” She nudged him to remind him to focus, and he opened his palms and gave her a little shrug as if to say, “What?”

Directly across from them sat Marie Laveau, as young tonight as she had been two nights ago during the adventure in the throne room. Hachi had an idea how she achieved her miraculous change, but knowing for sure would require more time to investigate—time she didn't have, and didn't want to take.

Beside Fergus, straight across from Blavatsky, was Queen Theodosia. Tonight she wore a simpler gown of blue velvet with yellow trim, and no crown. Theodosia was plain and unattractive, but was also supposed to be quick-witted, well educated, and intelligent. She had never married, but rumor had it she had once had an affair with a Karankawan chief. Perhaps he had loved her for her mind. Or her power. Hachi certainly had no ill feeling toward the queen, except for her harboring Blavatsky.

“We five are gathered here tonight in the hope that we might contact King Aaron, conqueror and first great king of Louisiana, and father to our dear Queen Theodosia,” Blavatsky said.

“Do we hold hands now?” Fergus asked.

“No,” Blavatsky told him, and Hachi kicked him under the table.

“Let us begin,” Blavatsky said, closing her eyes.

Hachi stared at Helena Blavatsky, the woman who had stolen her own father from her, and in the process, stolen Hachi's life. Blavatsky's arrogance and self-assuredness were back, as though she hadn't almost killed them all two nights ago. Back too was Queen Theodosia's faith in her—perhaps only due to the promise of speaking to her long-dead father again. That, at least, Hachi understood. She might have spared Blavatsky an hour or two more for the promise of speaking to her own father.

But in the end, Hachi
would
have her revenge.

“Spirits of the aether, Hidden Masters of the past,” Blavatsky said, drawing symbols in the air, “move among us. Be guided by these signs and the light of this world and visit us.”