The Dragon Lantern by Alan Gratz

then he heard it. A hissing sound, coming from his backpack. The sound of gas escaping. Oxygen, from the canister he’d used to breathe from on top of the balloon. When she’d been on his back, she must have pulled loose one of the tubes.
    Fergus’s warning came back to him suddenly: Don’t let the lamp near the oxygen. That would be bad.
    Boom bad.
    Archie scrabbled to turn off the lamp at his shoulder, but too late.
    There was a sucking sound, like water down a drain, and then—
    THOOM!
    Archie’s backpack exploded, blowing a hole in the wall of the warehouse and shooting him out into the clouds.

5
    Archie blinked awake and put a hand up to block the high, bright sun. He was lying on his back in a hole in the ground, covered with dirt. Where was he? How long had he been here? How did he get here?
    Then he remembered: the fox girl. The explosion. And the fall. The 20,000-foot drop . He’d blacked out on the way down. The hole he was lying in must be the hole he’d made when he hit the ground.
    Hit the ground from 20,000 feet up and survived. Again. A new personal best, he thought ruefully.
    Something round and dark blocked the sun, and he moved his hand away to see it. It was a balloon—a small, upside-down tear-shaped one, and from it hung not an airship but a man. An Iroquois man in a United Nations cavalry uniform.
    â€œI’ve got ’im!” the man yelled to someone else. “I’ve got ’im, and he’s alive!”
    Archie heard a bugle blare, and then another, and soon the ground began to shake. Thoom. Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.
    No, Archie thought. That sound— He struggled to sit up as dirt rained down on him. Those heavy footsteps, that pounding noise—he’d heard something exactly like it once before, in the underground puzzle traps that held Malacar Ahasherat imprisoned.
    It was the sound of a Mangleborn coming.
    A long, wide shadow fell over him in the hole, and Archie scrambled to the top, ready to fight. But what stood over him wasn’t a Mangleborn. It was a steam man. A giant steam man, as tall as a skyscraper.
    It leaned over to peer at him, and Archie saw a blond Yankee in a cavalry uniform peering out at him from behind the enormous glass eyes of the steam man. The man lifted a speaking tube to his mouth, and his voice boomed out through a speaker in the machine man’s mouth.
    â€œArchie Dent, I presume. Captain George Custer, U.N. 7th Steam Man Regiment,” the officer said by way of introduction. “Mrs. Moffett said we’d find you in a big hole in the ground, and by Hiawatha, there you are. Hang about and we’ll get you out of there.”
    Custer nodded to someone behind him, and the giant steam man reached down and scooped Archie out of the hole with a brass hand as big as a room.
    Mrs. Moffett was waiting for him in Cahokia on the Plains, and so too were Hachi, Fergus, and Mr. Rivets. Archie had been unconscious for hours, giving them all plenty of time to realize what had happened and to come below to find him. But the real work of searching for him had been done by Captain Custer and the aeronaut corps attached to the Colossus , the ten-story-tall steam man that had delivered him back to Cahokia. Archie descended from the giant steam man with its captain, wearing a steam-cavalry jacket that was ten sizes too big for him. His coat and shirt had been blown off in the explosion.
    â€œI am relieved to see you survived Master Fergus’s gyrocopter, Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said.
    Fergus shot Mr. Rivets a frown, then turned to Archie. “Good to see you, kiddo. Told you you’d get right up from that fall.”
    â€œFound him half-nekkid in a hole about two miles outside the city, as the airship flies,” Custer said. “Or should I say ‘the boy flies’?” Custer tipped the brim of his broad, round steam-cavalry hat back on his head. He was a handsome, neatly dressed man, perhaps