The League of Seven (36 page)

“So you're the Jandal a Haad,” Edison sang. “Batty Blavatsky got something right! The Joke of Chuluota. But who's laughing now?”

“Wait, what did he say?” Hachi yelled, hearing the name of the village where her father had died. “Archie, what's he talking about? Did he say Chuluota?”

But Archie wasn't listening. He was staring at something on his arm, just beneath his torn shirt. A cut.

But not a cut.

A crack.

There was no other way to describe it. There was no blood. No muscle. Nothing pink inside. Nothing human. Beneath his skin, there was only gray, like stone.

There was a crack in Archie's arm.

 

32

Archie stared at the crack in his arm.
What am I? Who am I?

Jandal a Haad
, the Swarm Queen whispered to him.
Made of Stone
.

Mangleborn
.
Monster
.

“No. No, I'm not a monster,” Archie whispered.

The Shadow,
Archie heard John Otter say.

“No,” Archie said.

“Archie! Archie, remember your mantra! Remember why you're here!” Hachi yelled to him. She was surrounded by insect men. Drowning in them.

Save Mom and Dad,
Archie told himself.
Save
—but he wasn't human. He was … something else, his mother said. They didn't know what he was.

A monster. A beast. An abomination.

Why hadn't his parents told him?

Not my parents. I'm not their son. I'm something else. I'm—

Jandal a Haad. Made of Stone. The Shadow.

Archie put his hands to his head. It felt like it was going to crack open.

A crack. There was a crack in him. Like a crack in a sidewalk. A crack in a stone.

The Great Bear. Heracles. Enkidu. The Golem. Always different, always the same,
Malacar Ahasherat whispered.
Strongmen. Shadows. Monsters
.

“No!” he yelled. “That's not me. I'm not—I'm not a monster!”

“Sticks and stones can't break his bones,” Edison sang again, his iron body doing a strange little back-and-forth dance. “But words can surely hurt him!”

Jandal a Haad.

Archie pulled at his hair. The Mangleborn's voice was unbearable. Visions of former League strongmen assaulted him, all of them raging monsters who had turned on their friends. Wave after wave of guilt and shame and agony. Relentless. His fists shook. His muscles clenched. He was a monster. He was a monster, and no one had told him. They had let him think he was a real boy, let him think he was normal, but all along he was something else. Something wrong. Something
evil
. He wanted to hit something. Wanted to smash things. Break bones. Crush skulls.

“Archie!” Hachi yelled. She fought her way over to him. “Archie, don't listen to it! You have to fight it, Archie. Fight it!”

“Shut up,” he cried. He beat on his head.

“I need help over here!” Fergus said. He swung the lead pipe at a moth man and missed. Moth men swarmed Archie's unconscious mother and father.

Not my mother. Not my father. Not my parents—

“Sticks and stone can't break his bones,” Edison sang.

Not the same, but the same. Always different, never different.

Hachi shook him. “Archie! Archie, you have to focus. Archie, listen to me!”

“Shut up! Just everybody
shut up
!” Archie roared. He backhanded Hachi, knocking her across the cavern. She hit the wall with a thud and slumped to the floor.

“Oy!” Fergus yelled.

Archie picked up a boulder twice his size and hurled it at Fergus. The rock missed him and smashed into the machine's console, destroying what was left of it.

“Archie, no,” Hachi moaned from the floor. Her voice was weak. “Archie, you have to—”

“Just
shut up
. Just everybody
shut up
!” Archie yelled. An insect man buzzed in Archie's face, and he ripped an arm from its body and beat the thing to death with it. When there was nothing left of its arm he tossed the shreds aside and pulled a metal strut from the wreckage of the great machine, swinging it like a club at anything that moved.
Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.

Your destiny,
the Swarm Queen sang to him.
Your birthright. You are the Jandal a Haad. You have the strength of a hundred men.

“Shut up!” Archie cried, cleaving an insect man in two with one swing. “
Shut up!
”

“Mantra,” Hachi whispered. “Remember—”

Archie rounded on her, panting, heaving. Fergus was there, helping her to her feet.

“Save … your parents,” Hachi told him.

“They're not my parents!” Archie yelled. “They can't be! I'm not human. I'm a monster!” He swung the great metal club at them, and the wall above Fergus and Hachi exploded into rock and dust. Hachi and Fergus limped toward the machine that sealed the tomb. Archie's parents were there too, awake again, and struggling to fend off the insect men.

Not his parents.

Archie lumbered toward them, dragging his impossibly big metal club along like a caveman.

“Archie. Please,” his not-mother said. “We love you. It doesn't matter that you're—”

“What? That I'm
what?”
Archie cried.

Something else. Something not human. Made of stone.

Shadow. Monster. Jandal a Haad.

“Only words can hurt him!” Edison crowed, still dancing.

Not the same, but the same. Always different, never different.

“Archie, listen to me. It's the Mangleborn doing this to you. Malacar Ahasherat,” Hachi told him. “It doesn't matter what you are. You're
Archie Dent
.” She backed into the broken machine, beside the people he'd thought were his parents. “You're our
friend
.”

“Archie, listen to her,” his not-father said.

He was nobody's friend. Nobody's son. Everyone had lied to him. He was a monster.

“Shut up,” Archie said wearily. “Please. Just—everybody
shut up
.”

But they wouldn't shut up. None of them. Not the Mangleborn, not Edison, not Hachi and Fergus, not his parents. Not the voice in his own head that told him he was no different from the thing in the pit. That he belonged there with it.

But he would make them be quiet.

He would make them
all
be quiet.

Archie raised his club, tears streaming down his face.

“I just—I just need you to shut up now,” he told them all.

Fergus ran away, but his not-parents and Hachi stayed where they were. Hachi drew her dagger, and Archie giggled through his tears. Like she could hurt him. Like anything could hurt him. He was unbreakable. He was—

Hachi stabbed his mother in the leg. Mrs. Dent cried out and crumpled to the ground.

“Mom!” Archie cried. He dropped the iron girder and fell to his knees to help her. “Mom! Are you all right?”

Hachi slumped back against the machine and held on to her stomach.

“You stabbed her!” Archie cried.

“You were going to bash her brains in with a big metal bar,” Hachi said, her voice tired and weak. “After you did me and Fergus.”

“Hi-yaaaah!” Fergus cried. He hobbled out from behind the machine with a lead pipe in his hands and whacked Archie in the head.
Clang
.

Archie didn't budge. He'd barely felt it.

Fergus looked at the bent pipe in his hands, then lifted it to hit Archie again.

“Stop. It's all right,” Hachi told him. “He's back.”

“Oh. Sorry, White, but you kind of went barmy there for a minute.”

Archie tore off part of his ragged shirt, and his father helped him tie it around his mother's leg.

“Callous, but effective,” Mr. Dent told Hachi. “I knew you were in there, Archie,” he said to his son. “We didn't raise you to be a monster.”

“I'm sorry,” Archie said. “I don't know what came over me. I—” He saw the crack in his arm again and covered it so the others couldn't see it. “I lost my head.”

“Sticks and stones can't break his bones,” sang an electronic voice behind them. “But they can hurt his friends.”

Archie stood and turned. Edison's great iron hulk waited behind him, Archie's metal club in its hands. Edison raised it, aiming for Fergus. Archie stepped in front of his friend as the metal bar came flying down.

Krang
. Archie caught it in his hands. He understood now. The Mangleborn had shown him. Archie wasn't just unbreakable. He was super strong. He always had been. Breaking little things all the time. Moving the Great Bear's stela. Turning the valve in Atlantis to flood the machine men. Leaving a dent in the brass floor of the puzzle trap room.

Archie had the strength of a hundred men, and he was going to use it on Edison.

Archie wrenched the metal bar from Edison's grip and whacked him with it.
Wham
. He dented Edison's big round dome.
Wham
. He smashed out one of the windows.
Wham
. He broke off one of Edison's arms.
Wham
.
Wham. Wham. Wham
. When the metal bar was bent beyond use, Archie tossed it aside and pounded on the iron suit with his fists.

“I'm not—”
Wham
. “—a monster.”
Wham
. “You're—”
Wham
. “—the monster.”
Wham
. “You're a brain—”
Wham
. “—in a big metal jar!”
Wham
.

Edison staggered back against the wall, his suit bent, broken, and fizzling. Archie pulled back his fist for one last punch, one that would tear the thing apart for good.

“Archie!” Hachi cried. “Archie! The pit!”

The floor rumbled. The low stone wall crumbled. Malacar Ahasherat roared, a sound like a hawk's cry mixed with the buzzing of a million hornets, and up out of the pit rose the head of the real monster. The Swarm Queen. Archie felt icy, primeval fear course through him like it had in the glade when his hair had turned white, but this time he was ready. He had seen Malacar Ahasherat before in his dreams. Seen her inhuman arms and legs, her cicada wings, her fly-like, compound eyes. He was ready for her.

The Swarm Queen's giant wings fluttered as she tried to pull herself through the half-open seal on her prison. Her head turned, and her glassy eyes found Archie, mirroring him a thousand times back at himself.

Jandal a Haad,
she said.

“My name,” he told her, “is Archie Dent.”

Jandal a Haad,
the Mangleborn said.
Join me.

“No thanks,” Archie told her. “But I know someone who's dying to meet you.”

Archie picked up what was left of Edison's broken iron body. It should have been impossible—a twelve-year-old boy lifting something so gigantic, so heavy. But Archie had the strength of a hundred men.

“Four and twenty blackbirds … baked in a pie,” Edison warbled.

Archie trudged over to the pit, Edison held high over his head and sparking.

“When the pie was opened … the birds began to sing,”

“Always the same,” Archie told the Swarm Queen. “You rise again, and the League of Seven always put you down.”

Malacar Ahasherat lashed out at Archie with a tentacle made of swarming insects, but she was too late. Archie hurled Edison's iron body on top of the Mangleborn, and they both fell back into the pit, Malacar Ahasherat screaming, Edison singing. The insect tentacle dissolved into a cloud of buzzing, skittering bugs.

“Fergus!” Archie yelled. “Seal it! Seal it now!”

“There's nothing I can do!” Fergus yelled back. He was desperately trying to operate the machine that controlled the seal, but it was too smashed. “Between you and Edison, you smashed the controls but good!”

“No!” Archie ran over to the machine. “What needs to turn? Where? Show me.”

Fergus studied the clockworks with his tinker's eye. “There—that's the one that should do it. But the gizmo's broken. There's no way I can work it—”

Archie grabbed one of the cogs of the giant gear and pushed. The metal groaned, but it started to turn. Hand over hand Archie turned the enormous wheel, and the machine that controlled the seal on the tomb came to life. One by one the stone seals over the Swarm Queen's prison closed—
thoom thoom thoom
—and it was done.

Archie slumped to the floor, exhausted, and Hachi nodded at him.

“Better,” she said wearily.