The Dragon Lantern (36 page)

Archie put his head in his hands and wished Hachi and Fergus were here. They would understand. They could help him. But they weren't here. He wouldn't see them again until Houston. And maybe not even then, if he couldn't swim out of the bay.

Archie stood, the sand of the seafloor swirling around him. Even though he was indestructible, it was scary down here. He wanted to get back on land. He jumped off the sand, kicking and waving his arms, but he quickly sank right back to the bottom of the bay.

He was made of stone, and stones didn't float.

Panic seized him. What if he spent the rest of his life down here? And how long
was
the life of a boy made out of stone? Archie had never thought about it before, but now he wondered if he would live forever. If maybe he would be stuck here, on the ocean floor, forever. He spun around in the water, sand kicking up around him again, and he flinched as a giant crab worked its way up out of the sand and scurried away on its gnarled crab legs.

Stop freaking out, you blinking flange,
Archie told himself.
Even if you can't swim, you can still walk.
He tried to calm himself. Like the crab, he could walk along the ocean floor. But which direction? The last thing he wanted to do was walk out of the bay into the ocean and come up a year later in the Japans.

The ocean is down; Don Francisco is up,
he told himself. He walked in a broad circle until he could get his bearings, and then started up the sloping sands toward the city. After what seemed like an eternity, he saw the enormous round pilings that supported the city's wharf growing out of the sand. A big metal cage filled with Dungeness crabs stirred and began to rise from the floor of the bay, and Archie climbed on top of it, riding it like an elevator. He stepped off as it came up to Fisherman's Wharf in downtown Don Francisco, much to the wonder and amazement of the tattooed Ohlone fishermen working the winch.

They were even more surprised when the giant brass steam man came loping and whistling at them down the pier. The fishermen scattered and ran as Buster barked and danced around Archie, knocking barrels and crab cages into the sea.

“Okay, okay!” Archie said, trying not to get knocked back into the ocean himself. “Hello, Buster. Hello. Clyde? Are you in there?”

He wasn't. Buster picked Archie up in his mouth and ran with him back along the wharf, depositing him near a group of Don Francisco police and ambulance workers who all stood talking with Clyde.

Clyde saw him and hurried over to shake his hand. “We thought we'd lost you,” he told Archie. “But I told them you were … pretty indestructible.”

“Yeah,” Archie said. “I fell into the bay and had to walk back. How did you get Buster back?”

“Hitched a ride with a whale oil tanker,” Clyde said.

Buster left them to go sit at the far end of the pier, smokestack wagging, where he watched Alcatraz Island floating in the distance.

“He's been sitting there ever since we got back,” Clyde said. “Waiting for you and Sings-In-The-Night.”

“Could she be—?” Archie asked.

“No,” Clyde said. “I saw her die. Kitsune saw it too.”

Archie closed his eyes. He'd seen it too, but he'd hoped that somehow maybe he'd been wrong.

“Where is she? Kitsune, I mean.”

Clyde led Archie to a small beach at the end of Fisherman's Wharf, where Kitsune had arranged thousands of little white seashells on the wet sand in the shape of a bird, its wings spread wide.

“I robbed an Illini chief's tomb near Shikaakwa once,” she said, laying the last shells in her design. “He was lying on a bed of seashell beads in the shape of a giant bird. Figured she deserved a hero's burial too.”

“When the tide comes in, all that's just going to get swept away,” Archie said.

“Good,” Kitsune said, rubbing the sand off her hands. “Then they can fly to her in the sea.”

They were all quiet for a moment. All Archie could see was Mrs. Moffett breaking Sings-In-The-Night's neck and dropping her into the ocean while he hung there helpless and watched.

“You went crazy,” Kitsune said at last.

Archie flushed. “I'm sorry. I kind of—I kind of do that sometimes.”

“You threw a prison door at Sings-In-The-Night,” Kitsune said. “You threw things and smashed things while Sings-In-The-Night went for the Dragon Lantern, and Mrs. Moffett killed her for it.”

Archie closed his eyes and hung his head. “I'm sorry. When I get like that, I can't think,” Archie told them. “I lose my mind, and I become … I become a monster. I've been trying to control it. My friend Hachi, she's been teaching me to focus. But they get inside my head. Start telling me things. Make me mad.”

Neither Clyde nor Kitsune had anything to say to that.

“Everything on Alcatraz was destroyed,” Clyde said finally. “Most of it ended up in the harbor as the island turned.”

“Because it wasn't an island,” Archie said. “It was a Mangleborn. That's what was making me crazy.”

“So what do we do now, boss?” Kitsune asked Archie.

Archie didn't know. Everything was lost. Sings-In-The-Night, Mrs. Moffett, the Dragon Lantern.

“We go east,” Clyde answered. The League's leader, leading. “That's the direction Mrs. Moffett went.”

“Back to New Rome?” Archie asked.

“No. Paiute country,” Clyde said. “Where they're bringing the Transcontinental Railroad together next week. Kitsune followed her to the train station. She bought a ticket for it, special.”

“Why? What's she want to do there?”

“Make trouble,” Kitsune said.

“What about the men she turned into monsters?” Archie asked. “Her ‘Shadow League'?”

“They didn't go with her,” Kitsune said. “She left alone.”

“The rest of them disappeared into the countryside,” Clyde said. “They've got police out looking for them. With Buster's help, we could probably get them all rounded up in a couple of weeks.”

Archie shook his head. “No. You're right. We have to stop Mrs. Moffett. She's got the lantern.”

If they
could
stop Mrs. Moffett. She'd beaten them too easily at Alcatraz, and it was mostly Archie's fault.

“What about that thing underneath the prison?” Clyde asked.

“It's not going to rise. Not now, at least,” Archie said. “It just wants to sleep. It … it told me.”

Kitsune cocked her head as though looking at Archie in a new way, and Clyde searched the sand at his feet like there might be some answers there to the questions in his frown.

“I'll explain everything about how I hear them when we're on the way,” Archie promised. “As much as I understand it, anyway. I just—I just want you to know, I'm not one of them. I'm not a monster. I really am your friend.”

“I'm glad,” said Clyde. “'Cause I'd hate to have you for an enemy, and that's a fact.”

The tide began to come in, pulling away the first shells in Kitsune's memorial to Sings-In-The-Night.

“Come on,” Clyde said. “I gotta go tell Buster his bird friend ain't coming back.”

32

The sun glinted over the white-capped mountains on the horizon, and waves of heat rose over the broad, dry salt flats of Paiute country as Buster steamed into Salt Lake City. A crowd was gathered around the railroad just south of town where the two ends of the Transcontinental Railroad finally met—one built east from Don Francisco, the other built west from Cahokia on the Plains. A newly built platform for official speeches bore the flags and banners of the various nations crossed by the rail line, and the salt flats all around it were full of steamcars, airships, and Tik Tok attendants.

Buster immediately drew a huge crowd of his own, including a nervous contingent of Paiute soldiers there to guard the ceremony. Clyde changed into his cleanest UN Steam Cavalry uniform and descended to introduce himself, telling everyone he had been sent as an official representative of the United Nations. Clyde shook hands and showed off Buster while Archie, Kitsune, and Mr. Rivets searched the crowd for Mrs. Moffett.

“She might have gone on back east,” Kitsune said.

“No. I think she's here,” Archie said. “She loves an audience. And what better audience is there than this?”

Besides the crowd, there were reporters and photographers from all the continent's major newspapers—
The New Rome Times, The Houston Chronicle, The Don Francisco Examiner, The Shikaakwa Sun, The Cahokia Post-Dispatch, The Standing Peachtree Journal
—and tribal chiefs and VIPs from coast to coast. As soon as the last ceremonial spike was hammered in, news reports would fly away from Salt Lake City by pneumatic post, announcing the opening of the railroad that finally connected one side of the continent to the other. Mrs. Moffett would be here, Archie was sure. She wouldn't miss the chance to announce her intentions to the world.

“Then if I were her,” Kitsune said, “I'd be hiding in plain sight. That's the best place to hide.”

“I would take Miss Kitsune's word as authoritative on that score,” Mr. Rivets said.

Kitsune bowed. “Thank you, Mr. Rivets. It's always nice to have one's skills respected. Sorry about the eyes, by the way.”

“Nothing that couldn't be repaired, miss,” Mr. Rivets said, indefatigable as always. “In fact, it prompted something of an upgrade.” Mr. Rivets gave the wind-up key on his chest a turn.

“Let's spread out. If you see her, yell,” Archie said.

Archie moved among the adults. The men wore black three-piece suits and top hats, and the women wore big pastel hoop skirts and fancy bonnets. One woman wore a hat that looked like a bird's nest, with fake birds hovering over it on wobbly wires. For the millionth time since they'd left Don Francisco, Archie saw Sings-In-The-Night struggle to fly away, saw the tentacle coil up around her, heard the
crack
as her neck broke. No matter what he did, he couldn't stop thinking about it. Every little thing reminded him of it. Sings-In-The-Night's death would haunt him for the rest of his life.

“If I could have your attention, please,” someone announced from the podium. “If all our special guests would assemble around the Golden Spike, we'd like to take a photo to commemorate this august occasion.”

Men and women from various tribes gathered where the railroad came together, and Cheyenne engineers drove two locomotives face-to-face with each other behind them to symbolize the meeting of East and West. A little Navajo man with a porkpie hat ran around telling the VIPs to squeeze closer together for the photograph, and Archie scanned their faces, looking for Mrs. Moffett. She wasn't among them. Where was she? Was she already on her way back to the East Coast, to turn the Dragon Lantern on New Rome, or Tethis, or Philadelphia? No, he couldn't believe it. She had to be here! He scoured the crowd for her face, but he still didn't see her.

“Yes, just there, please,” the little Navajo man said. “Just there. And in back? If you could move in a little closer, please?”

A red raygun beam sliced through the air above the crowd—then another—and there were screams. Archie caught Kitsune's eyes in the crowd and saw Clyde running for Buster. This was it! Mrs. Moffett was making her move! Archie pushed through the tall adults all around him, ready for a fight, but it wasn't Mrs. Moffett shooting a raygun. It was Jesse James!

The FreeTok bandit rode up with his gang in their modified steamtruck, whooping and hollering and firing into the air with their rayguns. If there was one person who loved a show more than Mrs. Moffett, it was Jesse James.

Archie ran out to meet him as he climbed out of the truck. “No! You can't be here! Not now,” Archie said.

“And miss liberating all this wonderful machinery?” James said.

A Paiute guard raised his oscillator to shoot, but one of the James Gang was faster. A ruby red aether beam lanced out and knocked the Paiute guard to the ground. People screamed.

“All right!” James yelled, stepping around Archie. “Let's not have any more heroes, and everyone will walk away from this in one piece! This here's a holdup! You have the honor of being robbed by the one and only Jesse James, outlaw FreeTok. This is a story you'll tell your children, and your children will tell it to
their
children, and they'll tell it to
their
children. You'll have reporters knocking down your doors to hear your tale of the day you were robbed by the great Jesse James, and your names'll be in papers from coast to coast. Maybe even a dime novel or two. And all it'll cost you are your machine men and your steamcars.”

A woman in the crowd cried out, and some of the men yelled their objections. Jesse James silenced them all with a shot from one of the raypistols he wore at his belt.

“Now, now. I think that's a small price to pay for being famous, don't you?” he said.