The Dragon Lantern Read Online Free

in their adventures together, but he still warmed at the thought of Hachi trusting him to do something right.
    â€œWell, getting back down should be a lot easier without this attached to the system to power it,” Archie said.
    â€œWe could always take the gyrocopters,” Fergus said hopefully.
    â€œWe climb down,” Hachi told them.
    â€œAw, you’re never any fun,” Fergus said, and they started down for Cahokia in the Clouds.
    *   *   *
    The city of Cahokia in the Clouds had been founded long ago when one of the many airships that docked beneath the giant balloon kite first decided to stay. More airships joined it, creating a village in the sky, and as it became a trading post and waystation in the air, it continued to grow. Houses and lodges and shops that were never meant to be airships were hauled up by balloon, and Cahokia in the Clouds grew down from its old town center like a dripping stalactite in a cave. Some people said it was a mile tall—the Mile High City, they called it—but no one had ever really measured it. It was always changing anyway. Every day, new pieces were attached and old pieces sprouted balloons and floated away, moving up and down the city with the prevailing winds and real estate prices.
    Archie, Hachi, and Fergus climbed down a rope ladder into Level 1, the oldest of the Old Town levels. The locals this high up didn’t need oxygen masks, but if you didn’t grow up here, you could very quickly find yourself tired out and dizzy, with a clanking headache to boot. Most visitors stayed in Midtown, near the Cahokia Man, which was where their lodge was. It was a long way from Level 1 to Midtown, so Archie, Hachi, and Fergus waited for a cable car.
    Cahokia in the Clouds stayed where it was in the heart of the North Americas because of an enormous cable made of some material that, like the canvas and rope of the giant balloon, no one knew how to make anymore. It was ancient tech, a relic from a civilization long gone, and it ran 20,000 feet down through the middle of Cahokia in the Clouds all the way to Cahokia on the Plains, the ruins of a once-great city on the ground where the new city in the sky was anchored.
    Along that giant tether, the people of Cahokia in the Clouds had attached lifelines to the ground. One tube carried water up. Another carried waste down. Pneumatic tubes along its length connected the Mile High City to the air-powered, cross-continent postal network, and a gas main brought light to the city in the sky. But for getting people up and down inside the city itself, its clever Illini designers had built steam-powered cars that traveled along the cable like streetcars turned on their ends.
    A cable car came up through the platform in the Level 1 station, the corkscrew-like worm gear on its back squeaking along a greased, brass-toothed track on the tether. Six rows of red padded seats, a couple occupied by Cahokians on their way uptown, climbed past them until the bottom row was level with the platform. The cable car stopped with a clank , and a Mark II Machine Man like the Dent family’s Mr. Rivets (only this one wearing a brass conductor’s cap instead of a bowler hat) pulled open a metal gate for them to climb on board.
    â€œFirst-row priority seating is reserved for city elders and persons with disabilities,” the machine man told him. “This is a downtown cable car bound for Statue Park and Midtown. Next stop, Level 2.”
    It had taken them so long to crawl back down off the balloon that it was almost the morning rush hour, and Archie, Hachi, and Fergus boarded the cable car with a few commuters sipping coffees and reading newspapers. Level after level of floating city went by, until at last they came to the head of Statue Park. Literally. Hanging out away from the tether cable from the bottom of the giant balloon above, plumb with the ground, was the ugly head of the statue that Statue Park was named