Hollow City

If anyone had been watching as the eight-thirty train hissed into the station and ground to a steaming halt, they wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary about it: not about the conductors and porters who wrestled open its latches and threw back its doors; not about the mass of men and women, some in military dress, who streamed out and disappeared into the swarming crowd; not even about the eight weary children who filed heavily from one of its first-class cars and stood blinking in the hazy light of the platform, their backs pressed together in a protective circle, dazed by the cathedral of noise and smoke in which they found themselves.

On an ordinary day, any group of children as lost and forlorn-looking as these would’ve been approached by some kindly adult and asked what the matter was, or whether they needed help, or where their parents were. But today the platform teemed with hundreds of children, all of whom looked lost and forlorn. So no one paid much attention to the little girl with tumbling brown hair and button shoes, or the fact that her shoes did not quite touch the floor. No one noticed the moon-faced boy in the flat cap, or the honeybee that drifted from his mouth, tested the sooty air, then dove back from whence it came.

No one’s gaze lingered on the boy with dark-ringed eyes, or saw the clay man who peeked from his shirt pocket only to be pushed down again by the boy’s finger. Likewise the boy who was dressed to the nines in a muddy but finely tailored suit and stove-in top hat, his face drawn and haggard from lack of sleep, for he hadn’t allowed himself any in days, so afraid was he of his dreams.

No one more than glanced at the big girl in the coat and simple dress, who was built like a stack of bricks and had lashed to her back a steamer trunk nearly as large as herself. None who saw her could have guessed how stupendously heavy the trunk was, or what it held, or why a screen of tiny holes had been punched into one side. Overlooked completely was the young man next to her, so wrapped in scarves and a hooded coat that not an inch of his bare skin could be seen, though it was early September and the weather still warm.

Then there was the American boy, so ordinary-looking he hardly merited notice; so apparently normal that people’s eyes skipped over him — even as he studied them, on tiptoe, neck swiveling, his gaze sweeping across the platform like a sentry’s. The girl by his side stood with her hands clasped together, concealing a tendril of flame that curled stubbornly around the nail of her pinky, which happened sometimes when she was upset. She tried shaking her finger as one might to extinguish a match, then blowing on it. When that didn’t work, she slipped it into her mouth and let a puff of smoke coil from her nose. No one saw that, either.

In fact, no one looked closely enough at the children from the first-class car of the eight-thirty train to notice anything peculiar about them at all. Which was just as well.

CHAPTER VIII

Emma nudged me.

“So?”

“I need another minute,” I said.

Bronwyn had set down her trunk and I was standing on it now, head above the crowd, casting my eyes over a shifting sea of faces. The long platform teemed with children. They squirmed like amoebas under a microscope, row upon row receding into a haze of smoke. Hissing black trains loomed up on either side, anxious to swallow them.

I could feel my friends’ eyes on my back, watching me as I scanned the crowd. I was supposed to know whether, somewhere in that great, seething mass, there were monsters who meant to kill us — and I was supposed to know it simply by looking; by assessing some vague feeling in my gut. Usually it was painful and obvious when a hollow was nearby, but in a giant space like this — among hundreds of people — my warning might only be a whisper, the faintest twinge, easy to miss.

“Do the wights know we’re coming?” Bronwyn asked, talking low for fear she’d be overheard by a normal — or worse yet, a wight. They had ears everywhere in the city, or so we’d been led to believe.

“We killed every one of them that might’ve known where we were going,” Hugh said proudly. “Or rather, I did.”

“Which means they’ll be looking for us even harder,” Millard said. “And they’ll want more than the bird now — they’ll want revenge.”

“Which is why we can’t stand here much longer,” Emma said, tapping me on the leg. “Are you almost finished?”

My focus slipped. I lost my place in the crowd. Began again.

“One more minute,” I said.

Personally, it wasn’t wights that concerned me most, but hollows. I’d killed two of them now, and each encounter had nearly been the end of me. My luck, if that’s what had been keeping me alive thus far, had to be running out. That’s why I was determined never to be surprised by another hollow. I would do everything in my power to sense them from a distance and avoid contact altogether. There was less glory in running away from a fight, sure, but I didn’t care about glory. I just wanted to survive.

The real danger, then, wasn’t the figures on the platform, but the shadows that lay between and beyond them; the darkness at the margins. That’s where I focused my attention. It gave me an out-of-body sort of feeling, to cast my sense out into a crowd this way, prodding distant corners for traces of danger. It wasn’t something I could’ve done a few days ago. My ability to direct it like a spotlight — this was new.

What else, I wondered, was left to discover about myself?

“We’re okay,” I said, stepping down from the trunk. “No hollows.”

“I could’ve told you that,” grumbled Enoch. “If there had been, they’d have eaten us by now!”

Emma took me aside. “If we’re to have a fighting chance here, you’ve got to be faster.”

It was like asking someone who’d just learned to swim to compete in the Olympics. “I’m doing my best,” I said.

Emma nodded. “I know you are.” She turned to the others and snapped her fingers for attention. “Let’s head for that phone box,” she said, pointing to a tall, red phone booth across the platform, just visible through the surging crowd.

“Who are we calling?” Hugh asked.

“The peculiar dog said that all of London’s loops had been raided and their ymbrynes kidnapped,” Emma said, “but we can’t simply take his word for it, can we?”

“You can call a time loop?” I said, flabbergasted. “On the phone?”

Millard explained that the Council of Ymbrynes maintained a phone exchange, though it could be used only within the boundaries of the city. “Quite ingenious how it works, given all the time differences,” he said. “Just because we live in time loops doesn’t mean we’re stuck in the Stone Age!”

Emma took my hand and told the others to join hands, too.

“It’s crucial we stay together,” she said. “London is vast, and there’s no lost and found here for peculiar children.”

We waded into the crowd, hands linked, our snaking line slightly parabolic in the middle where Olive buoyed up like an astronaut walking on the moon.

“You losing weight?” Bronwyn asked her. “You need heavier shoes, little magpie.”

“I get feathery when I ain’t had proper meals,” Olive said.

“Proper meals? We just ate like kings!”

“Not me,” said Olive. “They didn’t have any meat pies.”

“You’re awfully picky for a refugee,” said Enoch. “Anyway, since Horace wasted all our money, the only way we’re getting more food is if we steal it, or find a not-kidnapped ymbryne who’ll cook us some.”

“We still have money,” Horace said defensively, jingling the coins in his pocket. “Though not enough for meat pies. We could perhaps afford a jacket potato.”

“If I have another jacket potato, I’ll turn into a jacket potato,” Olive whined.

“That’s impossible, dear,” said Bronwyn.

“Why? Miss Peregrine can turn into a bird!”

A boy we were passing turned to stare. Bronwyn shushed Olive angrily. Telling our secrets in front of normals was strictly forbidden, even if they were so fantastic-sounding no one would believe them.

We shouldered through one last knot of children to arrive at the phone booth. It was only large enough to hold three, so Emma, Millard, and Horace squeezed inside while the rest of us crowded around the door. Emma worked the phone, Horace fished our last few coins from his pocket, and Millard paged through a chunky phone book that dangled from a cord.

“Are you kidding?” I said, leaning into the booth. “There are ymbrynes in the phone book?”

“The addresses listed are fakes,” said Millard, “and the calls won’t connect unless you whistle the right passcode.” He tore out a listing and handed it to Emma. “Give this one a go. Millicent Thrush.”

Horace fed a coin into the slot and Emma dialed the number. Then Millard took the phone, whistled a bird call into the receiver, and handed it back to Emma. She listened for a moment, then frowned. “It just rings,” she said. “No one’s picking up.”

“No bother!” Millard said. “That was just one of many. Let me find another …”

Outside the booth, the crowd that had been flowing around us slowed to a stop, bottlenecking somewhere out of sight. The train platform was reaching capacity. There were normal children on every side of us, chattering to one another, shouting, shoving — and one, who stood right next to Olive, was crying bitterly. She had pigtails and puffy red eyes, and she carried a blanket in one hand and a raggedy cardboard suitcase in the other. Pinned to her blouse was a tag with words and numbers stenciled in large print:

115–201

London → Sheffield

Olive watched the girl cry until her own eyes began to shimmer with tears. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and asked what the matter was. The girl looked away, pretending not to have heard.

Olive didn’t take the hint. “What’s the matter?” she asked again. “Are you crying because you’ve been sold?” She pointed to the tag on the girl’s blouse. “Was that your price?”

The girl tried to scoot away but was blocked by a wall of people.

“I would buy you and set you free,” Olive went on, “but I fear we’ve spent all our money on train tickets and haven’t enough even for meat pies, much less a slave. I’m awfully sorry.”

The girl spun to face Olive. “I’m not for sale!” she said, stamping her foot.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes!” the girl shouted, and in a fit of frustration she ripped the tag off her blouse and threw it away. “I just don’t want to go and live in the stupid country, that’s all.”

“I didn’t want to leave my home, either, but we had to,” Olive said. “It got smashed by a bomb.”

The girl’s face softened. “Mine did, too.” She put down her suitcase and held out her hand. “Sorry I got cross. My name is Jessica.”

“I’m Olive.”

The two little girls shook hands like gentlemen.

“I like your blouse,” Olive said.

“Thanks,” said Jessica. “And I like your — the — the whatsit on your head.”

“My tiara!” Olive reached up to touch it. “It isn’t real silver, though.”

“That’s okay. It’s pretty.”

Olive smiled as wide as I’d ever seen her smile, and then a loud whistle blew and a booming voice crackled over a loudspeaker. “All children onto the trains!” it said. “Nice and orderly now!”

The crowd began to flow around us again. Here and there, adults herded the children along, and I heard one say, “Don’t worry, you’ll see your mummies and daddies again soon!”

That’s when I realized why there were so many children here. They were being evacuated. Of all the many hundreds of kids in the train station this morning, my friends and I were the only ones arriving. The rest were leaving, being shuttled out of the city for their own safety — and from the look of the winter coats and overstuffed cases some of them carried, maybe for a long time.

“I have to go,” Jessica said, and Olive had hardly begun to say goodbye when her new friend was borne away by the crowd toward a waiting train. Just that quickly, Olive made and lost the only normal friend she’d ever had.

Jessica looked back as she was boarding. Her grim expression seemed to say: What will become of me?

We watched her go and wondered the same about ourselves.

Inside the phone box, Emma scowled at the receiver. “No one’s answering,” she said. “All the numbers just ring and ring.”

“Last one,” said Millard, handing her another ripped-out page.

“Cross your fingers.”

I was focused on Emma as she dialed, but then a commotion broke out behind me and I turned to see a crimson-faced man waving an umbrella at us. “What are you dallying about for?” he said.

“Vacate that phone box and board your train at once!”

“We just got off one,” said Hugh. “We ain’t about to get on another!”

“And what have you done with your tag numbers?” the man shouted, flecks of spittle flying from his lips. “Produce them at once or by God I’ll have you shipped somewhere a great deal less pleasant than Wales!”

“Piss off this instant,” said Enoch, “or we’ll have you shipped straight to Hell!”

The man’s face went so purple I thought he’d burst a blood vessel in his neck. Clearly, he wasn’t used to being spoken to this way by children.

“I said get out of that phone box!” he roared, and raising the umbrella over his head like an executioner’s ax, he brought it down on the cable that stretched between the top of the booth and the wall, snapping it in half with a loud thwack!

The phone went dead. Emma looked up from the receiver, boiling with quiet rage. “If he wants to use the phone so badly,” she said, “then let’s give it to him.”

As she, Millard, and Horace squeezed out of the booth, Bronwyn grabbed the man’s hands and pinned them behind his back.

“Stop!” he screamed. “Unhand me!”

“Oh, I’ll unhand you,” said Bronwyn, and then she picked him up, stuffed him headfirst into the booth, and barred the door shut with his umbrella. The man screamed and banged on the glass, jumping up and down like a fat fly trapped in a bottle. Although it would’ve been fun to stick around and laugh at him, the man had drawn too much attention, and now adults were converging on us from all across the station. It was time to go.

We linked hands and raced off toward the turnstiles, leaving behind us a wake of tripped and flailing normals. A train whistle screeched and was echoed inside Bronwyn’s trunk, where Miss Peregrine was being tossed around like laundry in the wash. Too light on her feet to run, Olive clung to Bronwyn’s neck, trailing behind her like a half-deflated balloon on a string.

Some of the adults were closer to the exit than we were, and rather than running around them, we tried to barrel straight through.

This didn’t work.

The first to intercept us was a big woman who smacked Enoch upside the head with her purse, then tackled him. When Emma tried to pull her off, two men grabbed her by the arms and wrestled her to the floor. I was about to jump in and help her when a third man grabbed my arms.

“Someone do something!” Brownyn cried. We all knew what she meant, but it wasn’t clear which of us was free to act. Then a bee whizzed past Enoch’s nose and buried its stinger in the haunches of the woman sitting astride him, and she squealed and leapt up.

“Yes!” Enoch shouted. “More bees!”

“They’re tired!” Hugh shouted back. “They only just got to sleep after saving you the last time!” But he could see that there was no other way — Emma’s arms were pinned, Bronwyn was busy protecting both her trunk and Olive from a trio of angry train conductors, and there were more adults on the way — so Hugh began pounding his chest as if trying to dislodge a piece of stuck food. A moment later he let out a reverberating belch, and ten or so bees flew out of his mouth. They did a few circles overhead, then got their bearings and began stinging every adult in sight.

The men holding Emma dropped her and fled. The one holding me got stung right on the tip of his nose, and he hollered and flapped his arms as if possessed by demons. Soon all the adults were running, trying to defend themselves from tiny, stinging attackers with spastic dance moves, to the delight of all the children still on the platform, who laughed and cheered and threw their arms in the air in imitation of their ridiculous elders.

With everyone thus distracted, we picked ourselves up, bolted for the turnstiles, and ran out into a bustling London afternoon.

We became lost in the chaos of the streets. It felt like we’d been plunged into a jar of stirred liquid, racing with particles: gentlemen, ladies, laborers, soldiers, street kids, and beggars all rushing purposefully in every direction, weaving around tiny, sputtering cars and cart vendors crying their wares and buskers blowing horns and buses blowing horns and shuddering to stops to spill more people onto the teeming sidewalks. Containing all this was a canyon of column-fronted buildings that stretched to vanishing down a street half in shadow, the afternoon sun low and muted, reduced by the smokes of London to a murky glow, a lantern winking through fog.

Dizzy from it, I half closed my eyes and let Emma pull me along while with my free hand I reached into my pocket to touch the cold glass of my phone. I found this strangely calming. My phone was a useless relic of the future but an object which retained some power nevertheless — that of a long, thin filament connecting this baffling world to the sane and recognizable one I’d once belonged to; a thing that said to me as I touched it, You are here and this is real and you are not dreaming and you are still you, and somehow that made everything around me vibrate a little less quickly.

Enoch had spent his formative years in London and claimed to still know its streets, so he led. We stuck mostly to alleys and back lanes, which made the city seem at first like a maze of gray walls and gutter pipes, its grandness revealed in glimpses as we dashed across wide boulevards and back to the safety of shadows. We made a game of it, laughing, racing one another between alleys. Horace pretended to trip over a curb, then bounced up nimbly and bowed like a dancer, tipping his hat. We laughed like mad, strangely giddy, half in disbelief that we’d made it this far — across the water, through the woods, past snarling hollows and death squads of wights, all the way to London.

We put a good long way between us and the train station and then stopped in an alley by some trash cans to catch our breath. Bronwyn set down her trunk and lifted Miss Peregrine out, and she wobbled drunkenly across the cobblestones. Horace and Millard broke out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” said Bronwyn. “It ain’t Miss P’s fault she’s dizzy.”

Horace swept his arms out grandly. “Welcome to beautiful London!” he said. “It’s ever so much grander than you described it, Enoch. And oh, did you describe it! For seventy-five years: London, London, London! The greatest city on Earth!”

Millard picked up a trash-can lid. “London! The finest refuse available anywhere!”

Horace doffed his hat. “London! Where even the rats wear top hats!”

“Oh, I didn’t go on about it that much,” Enoch said.

“You did!” said Olive. “ ‘Well, that’s not how they do things in London,’ you’d say. Or, ‘In London, the food is much finer!’ ”

“Obviously, we’re not on a grand tour of the city right now!” Enoch said defensively. “Would you rather walk through alleys or be spotted by wights?”

Horace ignored him. “London: where every day’s a holiday … for the trash man!”

He broke down laughing, and his laughter was infectious. Soon nearly all of us were giggling — even Enoch. “I suppose I did glamorize it a bit,” he admitted.

“I don’t see what’s so amusing about London,” Olive said with a frown. “It’s dirty and smelly and full of cruel, nasty people who make children cry and I hate it!” She scrunched her face into a scowl and added, “And I’m becoming quite peckish!”—which made us all laugh harder.

“Those people in the station were nasty,” said Millard. “But they got what they deserved! I’ll never forget that man’s face when Bronwyn stuffed him into the phone box.”

“Or that horrible woman when she got stung in the bum by a bee!” said Enoch. “I’d pay money to see that again.”

I glanced at Hugh, expecting him to chime in, but his back was to us, his shoulders trembling.

“Hugh?” I said. “You all right?”

He shied away. “No one gives a whit,” he said. “Don’t bother checking on old Hugh, he’s just here to save everyone’s hindquarters with no word of thanks from anybody!”

Shamed, we offered him our thanks and apologies.

“Sorry, Hugh.”

“Thanks again, Hugh.”

“You’re our man in a pinch, Hugh.”

He turned to face us. “They were my friends, you know.”

“We still are!” said Olive.

“Not you — my bees! They can only sting once, and then it’s lights out, the big hive in the sky. And now I’ve only Henry left, and he can’t fly ’cause he’s missing a wing.” He put out his hand and slowly opened the fingers, and there in his palm was Henry, waving his only wing at us.

“C’mon, mate,” Hugh whispered to it. “Time to go home.” He stuck out his tongue, set the bee upon it, and closed his mouth.

Enoch patted him on the shoulder. “I’d bring them back to life for you, but I’m not sure it would work on creatures so small.”

“Thanks anyway,” Hugh said, and then he cleared his throat and wiped his cheeks roughly, as if annoyed at his tears for exposing him.

“We’ll find you more just as soon as we get Miss P fixed up,” said Bronwyn.

“Speaking of which,” Enoch said to Emma, “did you manage to get through to any ymbrynes on that phone?”

“Not a one,” Emma replied, then sat down on an overturned trash can, her shoulders slumping. “I was really hoping we might catch a bit of good luck for once. But no.”

“Then it seems the dog was correct,” said Horace. “The great loops of London have fallen to our enemies.” He bowed his head solemnly. “The worst has come to pass. All our ymbrynes have been kidnapped.”

We all bowed our heads, our giddy mood gone.

“In that case,” said Enoch, “Millard, you’d better tell us all you know about the punishment loops. If that’s where the ymbrynes are, we’re going to have to stage a rescue.”

“No,” said Millard. “No, no, no.”

“What do you mean, no?” said Emma.

Millard made a strangled noise in his throat and started breathing weirdly. “I mean … we can’t …”

He couldn’t seem to get the words out.

“What’s wrong with him?” said Bronwyn. “Mill, what’s the matter?”

“You’d better explain right now what you mean by ‘no,’ ” Emma said threateningly.

“Because we’ll die, that’s why!” Millard said, his voice breaking.

“But back at the menagerie you made it sound so easy!” I said.

“Like we could just waltz into a punishment loop …”

Millard was hyperventilating, hysterical — and it scared me. Bronwyn found a crumpled paper bag and told him to breathe into it. When he’d recovered a bit, he answered.

“Getting into one is easy enough,” he said, speaking slowly, working to control his breaths. “Getting out again is trickier. Getting out alive, I should say. Punishment loops are everything the dog said and worse. Rivers of fire … bloodthirsty Vikings … pestilence so thick you can’t breathe … and mixed into all that, like some devilish bouillabaisse, bird knows how many wights and hollowgast!”

“Well, that’s fantastic!” said Horace, tossing up his hands.

“You might’ve told us earlier, you know — like back at the menagerie, when we were planning all this!”

“Would it have made any difference, Horace?” He took a few more breaths from the bag. “If I’d made it sound more frightening, would you have chosen to simply let Miss Peregrine’s humanity expire?”

“Of course not,” said Horace. “But you should’ve told us the truth.”

Millard let the bag drop. His strength was returning, and his conviction with it. “I admit I somewhat downplayed the punishment loops’ dangers. But I never thought we’d actually have to go into them! Despite all that irritating dog’s doomsaying about the state of London, I was certain we’d find at least one unraided loop here, its ymbryne still present and accounted for. And for all we know, we may still! How can we be sure they’ve all been kidnapped? Have we seen their raided loops with our own eyes? What if the ymbrynes’ phones were simply … disconnected?”

“All of them?” Enoch scoffed.

Even Olive, eternally optimistic Olive, shook her head at that.

“Then what do you suggest, Millard?” said Emma. “That we tour London’s loops and hope to find someone still at home? And what would you say the odds are that the corrupted, who are looking for us, would leave all those loops unguarded?”

“I think we’d have a better chance of surviving the night if we spent it playing Russian roulette,” said Enoch.

“All I mean,” Millard said, “is that we have no proof …”

“What more proof do you want?” said Emma. “Pools of blood? A pile of plucked ymbryne feathers? Miss Avocet told us the corrupted assault began here weeks ago. Miss Wren clearly believed that all of London’s ymbrynes had been kidnapped — do you know better than Miss Wren, an ymbryne herself? And now we’re here, and none of the loops are answering their telephones. So please, tell me why going loop to loop would be anything other than a suicidally dangerous waste of time.”

“Wait a minute — that’s it!” Millard exclaimed. “What about Miss Wren?”

“What about her?” said Emma.

“Don’t you remember what the dog told us? Miss Wren came to London a few days ago, when she heard that her sister ymbrynes had been kidnapped.”

“So?”

“What if she’s still here?”

“Then she’s probably been captured by now!” said Enoch.

“And if she hasn’t?” Millard’s voice was bright with hope.

“She could help Miss Peregrine — and then we wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the punishment loops!”

“And how would you suggest we find her?” Enoch said shrilly.

“Shout her name from the rooftops? This isn’t Cairnholm; it’s a city of millions!”

“Her pigeons,” said Millard.

“Come again?”

“It was Miss Wren’s peculiar pigeons who told her where the ymbrynes had been taken. If they knew where all the other ymbrynes went, then they should know where Miss Wren is, too. They belong to her, after all.”

“Hah!” said Enoch. “The only thing commoner here than plain-looking middle-aged ladies are flocks of pigeons. And you want to search all of London for one flock in particular?”

“It does seem a bit mad,” Emma said. “Sorry, Mill, I just don’t see how that could work.”

“Then it’s a lucky thing for you I spent our train ride studying rather than making idle gossip. Someone hand me the Tales!”

Bronwyn fished the book from her trunk and gave it to him. Millard dove right in, flipping pages. “There are many answers to be found within,” he said, “if you only know what to look for.” He stopped at a certain page and stabbed the top with his finger. “Aha!” he said, turning the book to show us what he’d found.

The title of the story was “The Pigeons of St. Paul’s.”

“I’ll be blessed,” said Bronwyn. “Could those be the same pigeons we’re talking about?”

“If they’re written about in the Tales, they’re almost certainly peculiar pigeons,” said Millard, “and how many flocks of peculiar pigeons could there possibly be?”

Olive clapped her hands and cried, “Millard, you’re brilliant!”

“Thank you, yes, I was aware.”

“Wait, I’m lost,” I said. “What’s St. Paul’s?”

“Even I know that,” said Olive. “The cathedral!” And she went to the end of the alley and pointed up at a giant domed roof rising in the distance.

“It’s the largest and most magnificent cathedral in London,” said Millard, “and if my hunch is correct, it’s also the nesting place of Miss Wren’s pigeons.”

“Let’s hope they’re at home,” said Emma. “And that they’ve got some good news for us. We’ve had quite a drought of it lately.”

As we navigated a labyrinth of narrow streets toward the cathedral, a brooding quiet settled over us. For long stretches no one spoke, leaving only the tap of our shoes on pavement and the sounds of the city: airplanes, the ever-present hum of traffic, sirens that warbled and pitch-shifted around us.

The farther we got from the train station, the more evidence we saw of the bombs that had been raining down on London. Building fronts pocked by shrapnel. Shattered windows. Streets that glinted with frosts of powdered glass. The sky was speckled with puffy silver blimps tethered to the ground by long webs of cable. “Barrage balloons,” Emma said when she saw me craning my neck toward one. “The German bombers get caught up in their cables at night and crash.”

Then we came upon a scene of destruction so bizarre that I had to stop and gape at it — not out of some morbid voyeurism, but because it was impossible for my brain to process without further study. A bomb crater yawned across the whole width of the street like a monstrous mouth with broken pavement for teeth. At one edge, the blast had sheared away the front wall of a building but left what was inside mostly intact. It looked like a doll’s house, its interior rooms all exposed to the street: the dining room with its table still set for a meal; family pictures knocked crooked in a hallway but still hanging; a roll of toilet paper unspooled and caught in the breeze, waving in the air like a long, white flag.

“Did they forget to finish building it?” Olive asked.

“No, dummy,” said Enoch. “It got hit by a bomb.”

For a moment Olive looked as if she might cry, but then her face went hard and she shook her fist at the sky and yelled, “Nasty Hitler! Stop this horrible war and go right away altogether!”

Bronwyn patted her arm. “Shhh. He can’t hear you, love.”

“It isn’t fair,” Olive said. “I’m tired of airplanes and bombs and war!”

“We all are,” said Enoch. “Even me.”

Then I heard Horace scream and I spun around to see him pointing at something in the road. I ran to see what it was, and then I did see and I stopped, frozen, my brain shouting Run away! but my legs refusing to listen.

It was a pyramid of heads. They were blackened and caved, mouths agape, eyes boiled shut, melted and pooled together in the gutter like some hydra-headed horror. Then Emma came to see and gasped and turned away; Bronwyn came and started moaning; Hugh gagged and clapped his hands over his eyes; and then finally Enoch, who seemed not in the least disturbed, calmly nudged one of the heads with his shoe and pointed out that they were only mannequins made of wax, having spilled from the display window of a bombed wig shop. We all felt a little ridiculous but somehow no less horrified, because even though the heads weren’t real, they represented something that was, hidden beneath the rubble around us.

“Let’s go,” Emma said. “This place is nothing but a graveyard.”

We walked on. I tried to keep my eyes to the ground, but there was no shutting out all the ghastly things we passed. A scarred ruin belching smoke, the only fireman dispatched to extinguish it slouched in defeat, blistered and weary, his hose run dry. Yet there he stood watching anyway, as if, lacking water, his job now was to bear witness.

A baby in a stroller, left alone in the street, bawling.

Bronwyn slowed, overcome. “Can’t we help them somehow?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference,” said Millard. “These people belong to the past, and the past can’t be changed.”

Bronwyn nodded sadly. She’d known it was true but had needed to hear it said. We were barely here, ineffectual as ghosts.

A cloud of ash billowed, blotting out fireman and child. We went on, choking in an eddy of windborne wreck dust, powdered concrete blanching our clothes, our faces bone white.

We hurried past the ruined blocks as quickly as we could, then marveled as the streets returned to life around us. Just a short walk from Hell, people were going about their business, striding down sidewalks, living in buildings that still had electricity and windows and walls. Then we rounded a corner and the cathedral’s dome revealed itself, proud and imposing despite patches of fire-blackened stone and a few crumbling arches. Like the spirit of the city itself, it would take more than a few bombs to topple St. Paul’s.

Our hunt began in a square close to the cathedral, where old men on benches were feeding pigeons. At first it was mayhem: we bounded in, grabbing wildly as the pigeons took off. The old men grumbled, and we withdrew to wait for their return. They did, eventually, pigeons not being the smartest animals on the planet, at which point we all took turns wading casually into the flock and trying to catch them by surprise, reaching down to snatch at them. I thought Olive, who was small and quick, or Hugh, with his peculiar connection to another sort of winged creature, might have some luck, but both were humiliated. Millard didn’t fare any better, and they couldn’t even see him. By the time my turn came, the pigeons must’ve been sick of us bothering them, because the moment I strolled into the square they all burst into flight and took one big, simultaneous cluster-bomb crap, which sent me flailing toward a water fountain to wash my whole head.

In the end, it was Horace who caught one. He sat down next to the old men, dropping seeds until the birds circled him. Then, leaning slowly forward, he stretched out his arm and, calm as could be, snagged one by its feet.

“Got you!” he cried.

The bird flapped and tried to get away, but Horace held on tight.

He brought it to us. “How can we tell if it’s peculiar?” he said, flipping the bird over to inspect its bottom, as if expecting to find a label there.

“Show it to Miss Peregrine,” Emma said. “She’ll know.”

So we opened Bronwyn’s trunk, shoved the pigeon inside with Miss Peregrine, and slammed down the lid. The pigeon screeched like it was being torn apart.

I winced and shouted, “Go easy, Miss P!”

When Bronwyn opened the trunk again, a poof of pigeon feathers fluttered into the air, but the pigeon itself was nowhere to be seen.

“Oh, no — she’s ate it!” cried Bronwyn.

“No she hasn’t,” said Emma. “Look beneath her!”

Miss Peregrine lifted up and stepped aside, and there underneath her was the pigeon, alive but dazed.

“Well?” said Enoch. “Is it or isn’t it one of Miss Wren’s?”

Miss Peregrine nudged the bird with her beak and it flew away. Then she leapt out of the trunk, hobbled into the square, and with one loud squawk scattered the rest of the pigeons. Her message was clear: not only was Horace’s pigeon not peculiar, none of them were. We’d have to keep looking.

Miss Peregrine hopped toward the cathedral and flapped her wing impatiently. We caught up to her on the cathedral steps. The building loomed above us, soaring bell towers framing its giant dome. An army of soot-stained angels glared down at us from marble reliefs.

“How are we ever going to search this whole place?” I wondered aloud.

“One room at a time,” Emma said.

A strange noise stopped us at the door. It sounded like a faraway car alarm, the note pitching up and down in long, slow arcs. But there were no car alarms in 1940, of course. It was an air-raid siren.

Horace cringed. “The Germans are coming!” he cried. “Death from the skies!”

“We don’t know what it means,” Emma said. “Could be a false alarm, or a test.”

But the streets and the square were emptying fast; the old men were folding up their newspapers and vacating their benches.

“They don’t seem to think it’s a test,” Horace said.

“Since when are we afraid of a few bombs?” Enoch said. “Quit talking like a Nancy Normal!”

“Need I remind you,” said Millard, “these are not the sort of bombs we’re accustomed to. Unlike the ones that fall on Cairnholm, we don’t know where they’re going to land!”

“All the more reason to get what we came for, and quickly!” Emma said, and she led us inside.

The cathedral’s interior was massive — it seemed, impossibly, even larger than the outside — and though damaged, a few hardy believers knelt here and there in silent prayer. The altar was buried under a midden of debris. Where a bomb had pierced the roof, sunlight fell down in broad beams. A lone soldier sat on a fallen pillar, gazing at the sky through the broken ceiling.

We wandered, necks craned, bits of concrete and broken tile crunching beneath our feet.

“I don’t see anything,” Horace complained. “There are enough hiding places here for ten thousand pigeons!”

“Don’t look,” Hugh said. “Listen.”

We stopped, straining to hear the telltale coo of pigeons. But there was only the ceaseless whine of air-raid sirens, and below that a series of dull cracks like rolling thunder. I told myself to stay calm, but my heart thrummed like a drum machine.

Bombs were falling.

“We need to go,” I said, panic choking me. “There has to be a shelter nearby. Somewhere safe we can hide.”

“But we’re so close!” said Bronwyn. “We can’t quit now!”

There was another crack, closer this time, and the others started to get nervous, too.

“Maybe Jacob’s right,” said Horace. “Let’s find somewhere safe to hide until the bombing’s through. We can search more when it’s over.”

“Nowhere is truly safe,” said Enoch. “Those bombs can penetrate even a deep shelter.”

“They can’t penetrate a loop,” Emma said. “And if there’s a tale about this cathedral, there’s probably a loop entrance here, too.”

“Perhaps,” said Millard, “perhaps, perhaps. Hand me the book and I shall investigate.”

Bronwyn opened her trunk and handed Millard the book.

“Let me see now,” he said, turning its pages until he reached “The Pigeons of St. Paul’s.”

Bombs are falling and we’re reading stories, I thought. I have entered the realm of the insane.

“Listen closely!” Millard said. “If there’s a loop entrance nearby, this tale may tell us how to find it. It’s a short one, luckily.”

A bomb fell outside. The floor shook and plaster rained from the ceiling. I clenched my teeth and tried to focus on my breathing.

Unfazed, Millard cleared his throat. “The Pigeons of St. Paul’s!” he began, reading in a big, booming voice.

“We know the title already!” said Enoch.

“Read faster, please!” said Bronwyn.

“If you don’t stop interrupting me, we’ll be here all night,” said Millard, and then he continued.

“Once upon a peculiar time, long before there were towers or steeples or any tall buildings at all in the city of London, there was a flock of pigeons who got it into their minds that they wanted a nice, high place to roost, above the bustle and fracas of human society. They knew just how to build it, too, because pigeons are builders by nature, and much more intelligent than we give them credit for being. But the people of ancient London weren’t interested in constructing tall things, so one night the pigeons snuck into the bedroom of the most industrious human they could find and whispered into his ear the plans for a magnificent tower.

“In the morning, the man awoke in great excitement. He had dreamed — or so he thought — of a magnificent church with a great, reaching spire that would rise from the city’s tallest hill. A few years later, at enormous cost to the humans, it was built. It was a very towering sort of tower and had all manner of nooks and crannies inside it where the pigeons could roost, and they were very satisfied with themselves.

“Then one day Vikings sacked the city and burned the tower to the ground, so the pigeons had to find another architect, whisper in his ear, and wait patiently for a new church tower to be built — this one even grander and taller than the first. And it was built, and it was very grand and very tall. And then it burned, too.

“Things went on in this fashion for hundreds of years, the towers burning and the pigeons whispering plans for still grander and taller towers to successive generations of nocturnally inspired architects. Though these architects never realized the debt they owed the birds, they still regarded them with tenderness, and allowed them to hang about wherever they liked, in the naves and belfries, like the mascots and guardians of the place they truly were.”

“This is not helpful,” Enoch said. “Get to the loop entrance part!”

“I am getting to what I am getting to!” Millard snapped.

“Eventually, after many church towers had come and gone, the pigeons’ plans became so ambitious that it took an exceedingly long time to find a human intelligent enough to carry them out. When they finally did, the man resisted, believing the hill to be cursed, so many churches having burned there in the past. Though he tried to put the idea out of his mind, the pigeons kept returning, night after night, to whisper it in his ear. Still, the man would not act. So they came to him during the day, which they had never done before, and told him in their strange laughing language that he was the only human capable of constructing their tower, and he simply had to do it. But he refused and chased them from his house, shouting, ‘Shoo, begone with ye, filthy creatures!’

“The pigeons, insulted and vengeful, hounded the man until he was nearly mad — following him wherever he went, picking at his clothes, pulling his hair, fouling his food with their hind-feathers, tapping on his windows at night so he couldn’t sleep — until one day he fell to his knees and cried, ‘O pigeons! I will build whatever you ask, so long as you watch over it and preserve it from the fire’

“The pigeons puzzled over this. Consulting among themselves, they decided that they might’ve been better guardians of past towers if they hadn’t come to enjoy building them so much, and vowed to do everything they could to protect them in the future. So the man built it, a soaring cathedral with two towers and a dome. It was so grand, and both the man and the pigeons were so pleased with what they’d made that they became great friends; the man never went anywhere for the rest of his life without a pigeon close at hand to advise him. Even after he died at a ripe and happy old age, the birds still went to visit him, now and again, in the land below. And to this very day, you’ll find the cathedral they built standing on the tallest hill in London, the pigeons watching over it.” Millard closed the book. “The end.”

Emma made an exasperated noise. “Yes, but watching over it from where?”

“That could not have been less helpful to our present situation,” said Enoch, “were it a story about cats on the moon.”

“I can’t make heads or tails of it,” said Bronwyn. “Can anyone?”

I nearly could — felt close to something in that line about “the land below”—but all I could think was, The pigeons are in Hell?

Then another bomb fell, shaking the whole building, and from high overhead came a sudden flutter of wingbeats. We looked up to see three frightened pigeons shoot out of some hiding place in the rafters. Miss Peregrine squawked with excitement — as if to say, That’s them! — and Bronwyn scooped her up and we all went racing after the birds. They flew down the length of the nave, turned sharply, and disappeared through a doorway.

We reached the doorway a few seconds later. To my relief, it didn’t lead outside, where we’d never have a hope of catching them, but to a stairwell, down a set of spiral steps.

“Hah!” Enoch said, clapping his pudgy hands. “They’ve gone and done it now — trapped themselves in the basement!”

We sprinted down the stairs. At the bottom was a large, dimly lit room walled and floored with stone. It was cold and damp and almost completely dark, the electricity having been knocked out, so Emma sparked a flame in her hand and shone it around, until the nature of the space became apparent. Beneath our feet, stretching from wall to wall, were marble slabs chiseled with writing. The one below me read:

BISHOP ELDRIDGE THORNBRUSH, DYED ANNO 1721

“This is no basement,” Emma said. “It’s a crypt.”

A little chill came over me, and I stepped closer to the light and warmth of Emma’s flame.

“You mean, there are people buried in the floor?” said Olive, her voice quavering.

“What of it?” said Enoch. “Let’s catch a damned pigeon before one of those bombs buries us in the floor.”

Emma turned in a circle, throwing light on the walls. “They’ve got to be down here somewhere. There’s no way out but that staircase.”

Then we heard a wing flap. I tensed. Emma brightened her flame and aimed it toward the sound. Her flickering light fell on a flat-topped tomb that rose a few feet from the floor. Between the tomb and the wall was a gap we couldn’t see behind from where we stood; a perfect hiding spot for a bird.

Emma raised a finger to her lips and motioned for us to follow. We crept across the room. Nearing the tomb, we spread out, surrounding it on three sides.

Ready? Emma mouthed.

The others nodded. I gave a thumbs-up. Emma tiptoed forward to peek behind the tomb — and then her face fell. “Nothing!” she said, kicking the floor in frustration.

“I don’t understand!” said Enoch. “They were right here!”

We all came forward to look. Then Millard said, “Emma! Shine your light on top of the tomb, please!”

She did, and Millard read the tomb’s inscription aloud:

HERE LIETH SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN BUILDER OF THIS CATHEDRAL

“Wren!” Emma exclaimed. “What an odd coincidence!”

“I hardly think it’s a coincidence,” said Millard. “He must be related to Miss Wren. Perhaps he’s her father!”

“That’s very interesting,” said Enoch, “but how does that help us find her, or her pigeons?”

“That is what I am attempting to puzzle out.” Millard hummed to himself and paced a little and recited a line from the tale: “the birds still went to visit him, now and again, in the land below.”

Then I thought I heard a pigeon coo. “Shh!” I said, and made everyone listen. It came again a few seconds later, from the rear corner of the tomb. I circled around it and knelt down, and that’s when I noticed a small hole in the floor at the tomb’s base, no bigger than a fist — just large enough for a bird to wriggle through.

“Over here!” I said.

“Well, I’ll be stuffed!” said Emma, holding her flame up to the hole. “Perhaps that’s ‘the land below’?”

“But the hole is so small,” said Olive. “How are we supposed to get the birds out of there?”

“We could wait for them to leave,” said Horace, and then a bomb fell so close by that my eyes blurred and my teeth rattled.

“No need for that!” said Millard. “Bronwyn, would you please open Sir Wren’s tomb?”

“No!” cried Olive. “I don’t want to see his rotten old bones!”

“Don’t worry, love,” Bronwyn said, “Millard knows what he’s doing.” She planted her hands on the edge of the tomb lid and began to push, and it slid open with a slow, grating rumble.

The smell that came up wasn’t what I’d expected — not of death, but mold and old dirt. We gathered around to look inside.

“Well, I’ll be stuffed,” Emma said.

CHAPTER IX

Where a coffin should’ve been, there was a ladder, leading down into darkness. We peered into the open tomb.

“There’s no way I’m climbing down there!” Horace said. But then a trio of bombs shook the building, raining chips of concrete on our heads, and suddenly Horace was pushing past me, grasping for the ladder. “Excuse me, out of my way, best-dressed go first!”

Emma caught him by the sleeve. “I have the light, so I’ll go first. Then Jacob will follow, in case there are … things down there.”

I flashed a weak smile, my knees going wobbly at the thought.

Enoch said, “You mean things other than rats and cholera and whatever sorts of mad trolls live beneath crypts?”

“It doesn’t matter what’s down there,” Millard said grimly.

“We’ll have to face it, and that’s that.”

“Fine,” said Enoch. “But Miss Wren had better be down there, too, because rat bites don’t heal quickly.”

“Hollowgast bites even less so,” said Emma, and then she swung her foot onto the ladder.

“Be careful,” I said. “I’ll be right above you.”

She saluted me with her flaming hand. “Once more into the breach,” she said, and began to climb down.

Then it was my turn.

“Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid,” I said, “and just wish you’d stayed in bed?”

Enoch kicked my shoe. “Quit stalling.”

I grabbed the lip of the tomb and put my foot on the ladder.

Thought briefly of all the pleasant, boring things I might’ve been doing with my summer, had my life gone differently. Tennis camp. Sailing lessons. Stocking shelves. And then, through some Herculean effort of will, I made myself climb.

The ladder descended into a tunnel. The tunnel dead-ended to one side, and in the other direction disappeared into blackness. The air was cold and suffused with a strange odor, like clothes left to rot in a flooded basement. The rough stone walls beaded and dripped with moisture of mysterious origin.

As Emma and I waited for everyone to climb down, the cold crept into me, degree by degree. The others felt it, too. When Bronwyn reached the bottom, she opened her trunk and handed out the peculiar sheep’s wool sweaters we’d been given in the menagerie. I slipped one over my head. It fit me like a sack, the sleeves falling past my fingers and the bottom sagging halfway to my knees, but at least it was warm.

Bronwyn’s trunk was empty now and she left it behind. Miss Peregrine rode inside her coat, where she’d practically made a nest for herself. Millard insisted on carrying the Tales in his arms, heavy and bulky as it was, because he might need to refer to it at any moment, he said. I think it had become his security blanket, though, and he thought of it as a book of spells which only he knew how to read.

We were an odd bunch.

I shuffled forward to feel for hollows in the dark. This time, I got a new kind of twinge in my gut, ever so faint, as if a hollow had been here and gone, and I was sensing its residue. I didn’t mention it, though; there was no reason to alarm everyone unnecessarily.

We walked. The sound of our feet slapping the wet bricks echoed endlessly up and down the passage. There’d be no sneaking up on whatever was waiting for us.

Every so often, from up ahead, we’d hear a flap of wings or a pigeon’s warble, and we’d pick up our pace a little. I got the uneasy feeling we were being led toward some nasty surprise. Embedded in the walls were stone slabs like the ones we’d seen in the crypt, but older, the writing mostly worn away. Then we passed a coffin, grave-less, on the floor — then a whole stack of them, leaned against a wall like discarded moving boxes.

“What is this place?” Hugh whispered.

“Graveyard overflow,” said Enoch. “When they need to make room for new customers, they dig up the old ones and stick them down here.”

“What a terrible loop entrance,” I said. “Imagine walking through here every time you needed in or out!”

“It’s not so different from our cairn tunnel,” Millard said.

“Unpleasant loop entrances serve a purpose — normals tend to avoid them, so we peculiars have them all to ourselves.”

So rational. So wise. All I could think was, There are dead people everywhere and they’re all rotted and bony and dead and, oh God …

“Uh-oh,” Emma said, and she stopped suddenly, causing me to run into her and everyone else to pile up behind me.

She held her flame to one side, revealing a curved door in the wall. It hung open slightly, but only darkness showed through the crack.

We listened. For a long moment there was no sound but our breath and the distant drip of water. Then we heard a noise, but not the kind we were expecting — not a wing-flap or the scratch of a bird’s feet — but something human.

Very softly, someone was crying.

“Hello?” called Emma. “Who’s in there?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” came an echoing voice.

Or was it a pair of voices?

Emma brightened her flame. Bronwyn crept forward and nudged the door with her foot. It swung open to expose a small chamber filled with bones. Femurs, shinbones, skulls — the dismembered fossils of many hundreds of people, heaped up in no apparent order.

I stumbled backward, dizzy with shock.

“Hello?” Emma said. “Who said that? Show yourself!”

At first I couldn’t see anything in there but bones, but then I heard a sniffle and followed the sound to the top of the pile, where two pairs of eyes blinked at us from the murky shadows at the rear of the chamber.

“There’s no one here,” said a small voice.

“Go away,” came a second voice. “We’re dead.”

“No you’re not,” said Enoch, “and I would know!”

“Come out of there,” Emma said gently. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

Both voices said at once: “Promise?”

“We promise,” said Emma.

The bones began to shift. A skull dislodged from the pile and clattered to the floor, where it rolled to a stop at my feet and stared up at me.

Hello, future, I thought.

Then two young boys crawled into the light, on hands and knees atop the bone pile. Their skin was deathly pale and they peeped at us with black-circled eyes that wheeled dizzyingly in their sockets.

“I’m Emma, this is Jacob, and these are our friends,” Emma said. “We’re peculiar and we’re not going to hurt you.”

The boys crouched like frightened animals, saying nothing, eyes spinning, seeming to look everywhere and nowhere.

“What’s wrong with them?” Olive whispered.

Bronwyn hushed her. “Don’t be rude.”

“Can you tell me your names?” Emma said, her voice coaxing and gentle.

“I am Joel and Peter,” the larger boy said.

“Which are you?” Emma said. “Joel or Peter?”

“I am Peter and Joel,” said the smaller boy.

“We don’t have time for games,” said Enoch. “Are there any birds in there with you? Have you seen any fly past?”

“The pigeons like to hide,” said the larger.

“In the attic,” said the smaller.

“What attic?” said Emma. “Where?”

“In our house,” they said together, and raising their arms they pointed down the dark passage. They seemed to speak cooperatively, and if a sentence was more than a few words long, one would start and the other finish, with no detectable pause between. I also noticed that whenever one was speaking and the other wasn’t, the quiet one would mouth the other’s words in perfect synchronicity — as if they shared one mind.

“Could you please show us the way to your house?” asked Emma. “Take us to your attic?”

Joel-and-Peter shook their heads and shrank back into the dark.

“What’s the matter?” Bronwyn said. “Why don’t you want to go?”

“Death and blood!” cried one boy.

“Blood and screaming!” cried the other.

“Screaming and blood and shadows that bite!” they cried together.

“Cheerio!” said Horace, turning on his heels. “I’ll see you all back in the crypt. Hope I don’t get squashed by a bomb!”

Emma caught Horace by his sleeve. “Oh, no you don’t! You’re the only one of us who’s managed to catch any of those blasted pigeons.”

“Didn’t you hear them?” Horace said. “That loop is full of shadows that bite — which could only mean one thing. Hollows!”

“It was full of them,” I said. “But that might have been days ago.”

“When was the last time you were inside your house?” Emma asked the boys.

Their loop had been raided, they explained in their strange and broken way, but they’d managed to escape into the catacombs and hide among the bones. How long ago that was, they couldn’t say. Two days? Three? They’d lost all track of time down here in the dark.

“Oh, you poor dears!” said Bronwyn. “What terrors you must’ve endured!”

“You can’t stay here forever,” said Emma. “You’ll age forward if you don’t reach another loop soon. We can help you — but first we have to catch a pigeon.”

The boys gazed into one another’s spinning eyes and seemed to speak without uttering a word. They said in unison, “Follow us.”

They slid down from their bone pile and started down the passage.

We followed. I couldn’t take my eyes off them; they were fascinatingly odd. They kept their arms linked at all times, and every few steps, they made loud clicking sounds with their tongues.

“What are they doing?” I whispered.

“I believe that’s how they see,” said Millard. “It’s the same way bats see in the dark. The sounds they make reflect off things and then back to them, which forms a picture in their minds.”

“We are echolocators,” Joel-and-Peter said.

They were also, apparently, very sharp of hearing.

The passage forked, then forked again. At one point I felt a sudden pressure in my ears and had to wiggle them to release it. That’s when I knew we’d left 1940 and entered a loop. Finally we came to a dead-end wall with vertical steps cut into it. Joel-and-Peter stood at the base of the wall and pointed to a pinpoint of daylight overhead.

“Our house — ” said the elder.

“Is up there,” said the younger.

And with that, they retreated into the shadows.

The steps were slimed with moss and difficult to climb, and I had to go slowly or risk falling. They ascended the wall to meet a circular, person-sized door in the ceiling, through which shone a single gleam of light. I wedged my fingers into the crack and pushed sideways, and the doors slid open like a camera shutter, revealing a tubular conduit of bricks that rose twenty or thirty feet to a circle of sky. I was at the false bottom of a fake well.

I pulled myself into the well and climbed. Halfway up I had to stop and rest, pushing my back against the opposite side of the shaft. When the burn in my biceps subsided, I climbed the rest of the way, scrambling over the lip of the well to land in some grass.

I was in the courtyard of a shabby-looking house. The sky was an infected shade of yellow, but there was no smoke in it and no sound of engines. We were in some older time, before the war — before cars, even. There was a chill in the air, and errant flakes of snow drifted down and melted on the ground.

Emma came up the well next, then Horace. Emma had decided that only the three of us should explore the house. We didn’t know what we would find up here, and if we needed to leave in a hurry, it was better to have a small group that could move fast. None who stayed below argued; Joel-and-Peter’s warning of blood and shadows had scared them. Only Horace was unhappy, and kept muttering to himself that he wished he’d never caught that pigeon in the square.

Bronwyn waved to us from below and then pulled closed the circular door at the bottom of the well. The top side was painted to look like the surface of water — dark, dirty water you’d never want to drop a drinking bucket into. Very clever.

The three of us huddled together and looked around. The courtyard and the house were suffering from serious neglect. The grass around the well was tamped down, but everywhere else it grew up in weedy thickets that reached higher than some of the ground-floor windows. A doghouse sat rotting and half collapsed in one corner, and near it a toppled laundry line was gradually being swallowed by brush.

We stood and waited, listening for pigeons. From beyond the house’s walls, I could hear the tap of horses’ hooves on pavement. No, this definitely wasn’t London circa 1940.

Then, in one of the upper-floor windows, I saw a curtain shift.

“Up there!” I hissed, pointing at it.

I didn’t know if a bird or a person had done it, but it was worth checking out. I started toward a door that led into the house, beckoning the others after me — then tripped over something. It was a body lying on the ground, covered head to ankle with a black tarp. A pair of worn shoes poked from one end, pointing at the sky. Tucked into one cracked sole was a white card, on which had been written in neat script:

Mr. A. F. Crumbley

Lately of the Outer Provinces

Aged forward rather than be taken alive

Kindly requests his remains be deposited in the Thames

“Unlucky bastard,” Horace whispered. “He came here from the country, probably after his own loop was raided — only to have the one he’d escaped to raided, as well.”

“But why would they leave poor Mr. Crumbley out in the open this way?” whispered Emma.

“Because they had to leave in a hurry,” I said.

Emma bent down and reached for the edge of Mr. Crumbley’s tarp. I didn’t want to look but couldn’t help myself, and I half turned away but peeked back through split fingers. I had expected a withered corpse, but Mr. Crumbley looked perfectly intact and surprisingly young, perhaps only forty or fifty years old, his black hair graying just around the temples. His eyes were closed and peaceful, as if he might’ve just been sleeping. Could he really have aged forward, like the leathery apple I took from Miss Peregrine’s loop?

“Hullo, are you dead or asleep?” Emma said. She nudged the man’s ear with her boot, and the side of his head caved and crumbled to dust.

Emma gasped and let the tarp fall back. Crumbley had become a desiccated cast of himself, so fragile that a strong wind could blow him apart.

We left poor, crumbling Mr. Crumbley behind and went to the door. I grasped the knob and turned it. The door opened and we stepped through it into a laundry room. There were fresh-looking clothes in a hamper, a washboard hung neatly above a sink. This place had not been abandoned long.

The Feeling was stronger here, but was still only residue. We opened another door and came into a sitting room. My chest tightened. Here was clear evidence of a fight: furniture scattered and overturned, pictures knocked off the mantel, stripes of wallpaper shredded to ribbons.

Then Horace muttered, “Oh, no,” and I followed his gaze upward, to a dark stain discoloring a roughly circular patch of ceiling. Something awful had happened upstairs.

Emma squeezed her eyes closed. “Just listen,” she said. “Listen for the birds and don’t think about anything else.”

We closed our eyes and listened. A minute passed. Then, finally, the fluttering coo of a pigeon. I opened my eyes to see where it had come from.

The staircase.

We mounted the stairs gently, trying not to creak them under our feet. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, in my temple. I could handle old, brittle corpses. I wasn’t sure if I could take a murder scene.

The second-floor hallway was littered with debris. A door, torn from its hinges, lay splintered. Through the broken doorway was a fallen tower of trunks and dressers; a failed blockade.

In the next room, the white carpet was soaked with blood — the stain that had leaked through the floor to the ceiling below. But whomever it had leaked from was long gone.

The last door in the hall showed no signs of forced entry. I pushed it open warily. My eyes scanned the room: there was a wardrobe, a dresser topped with carefully arranged figurines, lace curtains fluttering in a window. The carpet was clean. Everything undisturbed.

Then my eyes went to the bed, and what was in it, and I stumbled back against the doorjamb. Nestled under clean white covers were two men, seemingly asleep — and between them, two skeletons.

“Aged forward,” said Horace, his hands trembling at his throat. “Two of them considerably more than the others.”

The men who looked asleep were as dead as Mr. Crumbley downstairs, Horace said, and if we touched them, they would disintegrate in just the same way.

“They gave up,” Emma whispered. “They got tired of running and they gave up.” She looked at them with a mix of pity and disgust.

She thought they were weak and cowardly — that they’d taken the easy way out. I couldn’t help wondering, though, if these peculiars simply knew more than we did about what the wights did with their captives. Maybe we would choose death, too, if we knew.

We drifted into the hall. I felt dizzy and sick, and I wanted out of this house — but we couldn’t leave yet. There was one last staircase to climb.

At the top, we found a smoke-damaged landing. I imagined peculiars who’d withstood the initial attack on this house gathering here for a last stand. Maybe they’d tried to fight the corrupted with fire — or maybe the corrupted had tried to smoke them out. Either way, it looked like the house had come close to burning down.

Ducking through a low doorway, we entered a narrow, slope-walled attic. Everything here was burned black. Flames had made gaping holes in the roof.

Emma prodded Horace. “It’s here somewhere,” she said quietly. “Work your magic, bird-catcher.”

Horace tiptoed into the middle of the room and sing-songed, “Heeeeere, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon …”

Then, from behind us, we heard a wingbeat and a strangled chirp. We turned to see not a pigeon but a girl in a black dress, half hidden in the shadows.

“Is this what you’re after?” the girl said, raising one arm into a shaft of sunlight. The pigeon squirmed in her hand, struggling to free itself.

“Yes!” Emma said. “Thank heaven you caught it!” She moved toward the girl with her hands out to take the pigeon, but the girl shouted, “Stop right there!” and snapped her fingers. A charred throw rug flew out from beneath Emma and took her feet with it, sending her crashing to the floor.

I rushed to Emma. “Are you okay?”

“On your knees!” the girl barked at me. “Put your hands on your head!”

“I’m fine,” Emma said. “Do as she says. She’s telekinetic and clearly unstable.”

I knelt down by Emma and laced my fingers behind my head.

Emma did the same. Horace, trembling and silent, sat heavily and placed his palms on the floor.

“We don’t mean you any harm,” Emma said. “We’re only after the pigeon.”

“Oh, I know perfectly well what you’re after,” the girl said with a sneer. “Your kind never gives up, do you?”

“Our kind?” I said.

“Lay down your weapons and slide them over!” barked the girl.

“We don’t have any,” Emma said calmly, trying her best not to upset the girl any further.

“This will go easier for you if you don’t assume I’m stupid!” the girl shouted. “You’re weak and have no powers of your own, so you rely on guns and things. Now lay them on the floor!”

Emma turned her head and whispered, “She thinks we’re wights!”

I almost laughed out loud. “We aren’t wights. We’re peculiar!”

“You aren’t the first blank-eyes to come here pigeon-hunting,” she said, “nor the first to try impersonating peculiar children. And you wouldn’t be the first I’ve killed, neither! Now put your weapons on the floor before I snap this pigeon’s neck — and then yours!”

“But we aren’t wights!” I insisted. “Look at our pupils if you don’t believe us!”

“Your eyes don’t mean nothing!” the girl said. “False lenses are the oldest trick in the book — and trust me, I know ’em all.”

The girl took a step toward us, into the light. Hate smoldered in her eyes. She was tomboyish, except for the dress, with short hair and a muscular jaw. She had the glassy look of someone who hadn’t slept in days; who was running now on instinct and adrenaline. Someone in that condition wouldn’t be kind to us, nor patient.

“We are peculiar, I swear!” Emma said. “Watch — I’ll show you!” She lifted one hand from her head and was about to make a flame when a sudden intuition made me grab her wrist.

“If there are hollows close by, they’ll sense it,” I said. “I think they can feel us kind of like I feel them — but it’s much easier for them when we use our powers. It’s like setting off an alarm.”

“But you’re using your power,” she said, irritated. “And she’s using hers!”

“Mine is passive,” I said. “I can’t turn it off, so it doesn’t leave much of a trail. As for her — maybe they already know she’s here. Maybe it’s not her they want.”

“How convenient!” the girl said to me. “And that’s supposed to be your power? Sensing shadow creatures?”

“He can see them, too,” said Emma. “And kill them.”

“You need to invent better lies,” the girl said. “No one with half a brain would buy that.”

Just as we were talking about it, a new Feeling blossomed painfully inside me. I was no longer sensing the left-behind residue of a hollow, but the active presence of one.

“There’s one nearby,” I said to Emma. “We need to get out of here.”

“Not without the bird,” she muttered.

The girl started across the room toward us. “Time to get on with it,” she said. “I’ve given you more than enough chances to prove yourselves. Anyway, I’m beginning to enjoy killing you things. After what you did to my friends, I just can’t seem to get enough of it!”

She stopped a few feet from us and raised her free hand — about to bring what was left of the roof down on our heads, maybe. If we were going to make a move, it had to be now.

I sprang from my crouched position, threw my arms in front of me, and collided with the girl, knocking her to the floor. She cried out in angry surprise. I rammed my fist into the palm of her free hand so she couldn’t snap her fingers again. She let the bird go, and Emma grabbed it.

Then Emma and I were up, rushing toward the open door. Horace was still on the floor in a daze. “Get up and run!” Emma shouted at him.

I was pulling Horace up by his arms when the door slammed in my face and a burned dresser lifted out of the corner and flew across the room. The edge of it connected with my head and I went sprawling, taking Emma down with me.

The girl was in a rage, screaming. I was certain we had only seconds to live. Then Horace stood up and shouted at the top of his lungs:

“Melina Manon!”

The girl froze. “What did you say?”

“Your name is Melina Manon,” he said. “You were born in Luxembourg in 1899. You came to live with Miss Thrush when you were sixteen years old, and have been here ever since.”

Horace had caught her off guard. She frowned, then made an arcing motion with her hand. The dresser that had nearly knocked me unconscious sailed through the air and then stopped, hovering, directly above Horace. If she let it drop, it would crush him. “You’ve done your homework,” said the girl, “but any wight could know my name and birthplace. Unfortunately for you, I no longer find your deceptions interesting.”

And yet, she didn’t quite seem ready to kill him.

“Your father was a bank clerk,” Horace said, speaking quickly.

“Your mother was very beautiful but smelled strongly of onions, a lifelong condition she could do nothing to cure.”

The dresser wobbled above Horace. The girl stared at him, her brows knit together, hand in the air.

“When you were seven, you badly wanted an Arabian horse,” Horace continued. “Your parents couldn’t afford such an extravagant animal, so they bought a donkey instead. You named him Habib, which means beloved. And loved him you did.”

The girl’s mouth fell open.

Horace went on.

“You were thirteen when you realized you could manipulate objects using only your mind. You started with small things, paper clips and coins, then larger and larger ones. But you could never pick up Habib with your mind, because your ability did not extend to living creatures. When your family moved houses, you thought it had gone away entirely, because you couldn’t move anything at all anymore. But it was simply that you hadn’t gotten to know the new house yet. Once you became familiar with it, mapped it in your mind, you could move objects within its walls.”

“How could you possibly know all this?” Melina said, gaping at him.

“Because I dreamed about you,” said Horace. “That’s what I can do.”

“My God,” said the girl, “you are peculiar.”

And the dresser drifted gently to the floor.

I wobbled to my feet, head throbbing where the dresser had hit me.

“You’re bleeding!” Emma said, jumping up to inspect my cut.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, dodging her. The Feeling was shifting inside me, and being touched while it was happening made it harder to interpret; interrupted its development somehow.

“Sorry about your head,” Melina Manon said. “I thought I was the only peculiar left!”

“There’s a whole gang of us down your well, in the catacomb tunnel,” Emma said.

“Really?” Melina’s face lit up. “Then there’s still hope!”

“There was,” said Horace. “But it just flew out the hole in your roof.”

“What — you mean Winnifred?” Melina put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. A moment later, the pigeon appeared, flying down through the hole to land on her shoulder.

“Marvelous!” said Horace, clapping his hands. “How’d you do that?”

“Winnie’s my chum,” Melina said. “Tame as a house cat.”

I wiped some blood from my forehead with the back of my hand, then chose to ignore the pain. There wasn’t time to be hurt. I said to the girl, “You mentioned that wights have been here, chasing pigeons.”

Melina nodded. “Them and their shadow beasts came three nights ago. Surrounded the place, took Miss Thrush and half our wards here, then set fire to the house. I hid on the roof. Since then, wights have come back every day, in little groups, hunting for Winnifred and her friends.”

“And you killed them?” Emma asked.

Melina looked down. “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

She was too proud to admit she’d lied. It didn’t matter.

“Then we’re not the only ones hunting for Miss Wren,” Emma said.

“That means she’s still free,” I said.

“Maybe,” said Emma. “Maybe.”

“We think the pigeon can help us,” I said. “We need to find Miss Wren, and we think the bird knows how.”

“I never heard of any Miss Wren,” said Melina. “I just feed Winnie when she comes into our courtyard. We’re friends, she and I. Ain’t we, Winnie?”

The bird chirped happily on her shoulder.

Emma moved close to Melina and addressed the pigeon. “Do you know Miss Wren?” she said, enunciating loudly. “Can you help us find her? Miss Wren?”

The pigeon leapt off Melina’s shoulder and flapped across the room to the door. She warbled and fluttered her wings, then flew back.

This way, it seemed to say.

That was proof enough for me. “We need to take the bird with us,” I said.

“Not without me,” said Melina. “If Winnie knows how to find this ymbryne, then I’m coming, too.”

“Not a good idea,” said Horace. “We’re on a dangerous mission, you see — ”

Emma cut him off. “Give us the bird. We’ll come back for you, I promise.”

A sudden jolt of pain made me gasp and double over.

Emma rushed to my side. “Jacob! Are you all right?”

I couldn’t speak. Instead I hobbled to the window, forced myself upright, and projected my Feeling out toward the cathedral dome, visible over the rooftops just a few blocks away — then down at the street, where horse-drawn wagons rattled past.

Yes, there. I could feel them approaching from a side street, not far away.

Them. Not one hollow, but two.

“We have to go,” I said. “Now.”

“Please,” Horace begged the girl. “We must have the pigeon!”

Melina snapped her fingers, and the dresser that had nearly killed me raised up off the floor again. “I can’t allow that,” she said, narrowing her eyes and flicking them toward the dresser just to make sure we understood one another. “But take me along and you get Winnie in the bargain. Otherwise …”

The dresser pirouetted on one wooden leg, then tipped and crashed onto its side.

“Fine then,” Emma said through her teeth. “But if you slow us down, we take the bird and leave you behind.”

Melina grinned, and with a flick of her hand the door banged open.

“Whatever you say.”

We flew down the stairs so fast that our feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. In twenty seconds we were back in the courtyard, leaping over dead Mr. Crumbley, diving down the dry well. I went first, kicking in the mirrored door at the bottom rather than wasting time sliding it open. It broke from its hinges and fell in pieces. “Look out below!” I called, then lost my grip on the wet stone steps and fell flailing and tumbling into the dark.

A pair of strong arms caught me — Bronwyn’s — and set my feet on the floor. I thanked her, my heart pounding.

“What happened up there?” asked Bronwyn. “Did you catch the pigeon?”

“We got it,” I said as Emma and Horace reached the bottom, and a cheer went up among our friends. “That’s Melina,” I said, pointing up at her, and that was all the time for introductions we had. Melina was still at the top of the steps, fooling with something. “Come on!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

“Buying us time!” she shouted back, and then she pulled shut and locked a wooden lid that capped the well, closing out the last rays of light. As she climbed down in darkness, I explained about the hollows that were chasing us. In my panicked state, this came out as “GO NOW RUN HOLLOWS NOW,” which was effective if not terribly articulate, and threw everyone into hysterics.

“How can we run if we can’t see?!” Enoch shouted. “Light a flame, Emma!”

She’d been holding off because of my warning back in the attic.

Now seemed like a good time to reinforce that, so I grabbed her arm and said, “Don’t! They’ll be able to pinpoint us too easily!” Our best hope, I thought, was to lose them in this forking maze of tunnels.

“But we can’t just run blindly in the dark!” said Emma.

“Of course,” said the younger echolocator.

“We can,” said the older.

Melina stumbled toward their voices. “Boys! You’re alive! It’s me — it’s Melina!”

Joel-and-Peter said:

“We thought you were — ”

“Dead every last — ”

“One of you.”

“Everyone link hands!” Melina said. “Let the boys lead the way!”

So I took Melina’s hand in the dark and Emma took mine, then she felt for Bronwyn’s, and so on until we’d formed a human chain with the blind brothers in the lead. Then Emma gave the word and the boys took off at an easy run, plunging us into the black.

We forked left. Splashed through puddles of standing water. Then from the tunnel behind us came an echoing crash that could only have meant one thing: the hollows had smashed through the well door.

“They’re in!” I shouted.

I could almost feel them narrowing their bodies, wriggling down into the shaft. Once they made it to level ground and could run, they’d overtake us in no time. We’d only passed one split in the tunnels — not enough to lose them. Not nearly enough.

Which is why what Millard said next struck me as patently insane: “Stop! Everyone stop!”

The blind boys listened to him. We piled up behind them, tripping and skidding to a halt.

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I shouted. “Run!”

“So sorry,” Millard said, “but this just occurred to me — one of us will have to pass through the loop exit before the echolocators or the girl do, or they will cross into the present and we into 1940, and we’ll be separated. For them to travel to 1940 with us, one of us has to go first and open the way.”

“You didn’t come from the present?” Melina said, confused.

“From 1940, like he said,” Emma replied. “It’s raining bombs out there, though. You might want to stay behind.”

“Nice try,” said Melina, “you ain’t getting rid of me that easy. It’s got to be worse in the present — wights everywhere! That’s why I never left Miss Thrush’s loop.”

Emma stepped forward and pulled me with her. “Fine! We’ll go first!”

I stuck out my free arm, feeling blindly in the dark. “But I can’t see a thing!”

The elder echolocator said, “It’s just twenty paces ahead there, you — ”

“Can’t miss it,” said the younger.

So we plodded ahead, waving our hands in front of us. I kicked something with my foot and stumbled. My left shoulder scraped the wall.

“Keep it straight!” Emma said, pulling me to the right.

My stomach lurched. I could feel it: the hollows had made it down the well shaft. Now, even if they couldn’t sense us, there was a fifty-fifty chance they’d choose the right spur of the tunnel and find us anyway.

The time for sneaking around was over. We had to run.

“Screw it,” I said. “Emma, give me a light!”

“Gladly!” She let my hand go and made a flame so large I felt the hair on the right side of my head singe.

I saw the transition point right away. It was just ahead of us, marked by a vertical line painted on the tunnel wall. We took off running for it in a mob.

The moment we passed it, I felt a pressure in my ears. We were back in 1940.

We bolted through the catacombs, Emma’s fire casting manic shadows across the walls, the blind boys clicking loudly with their tongues and shouting out “Left!” or “Right!” when we came to splits in the tunnel.

We passed the stack of coffins, the landslide of bones. Finally we returned to the dead end and the ladder to the crypt. I shoved Horace up ahead of me, then Enoch, and then Olive took off her shoes and floated up.

“We’re taking too long!” I shouted.

Down the passage I could feel them coming. Could hear their tongues pounding the stone floor, propelling them forward. Could picture their jaws beginning to drip black goo in anticipation of a kill.

Then I saw them. A blur of dark motion in the distance.

I screamed, “Go!” and leapt onto the ladder, the last one to climb it. When I was near the top, Bronwyn reached down her arm and yanked me up the last few rungs, and then I was in the crypt with everyone else.

Groaning loudly, Bronwyn picked up the stone slab that topped Christopher Wren’s tomb and dropped it back in place. Not two seconds later, something slammed violently against the underside of it, making the heavy slab leap. It wouldn’t hold the hollows for long — not two of them.

They were so close. Alarms blared inside me, my stomach aching like I’d drunk acid. We dashed up the spiral staircase and into the nave. The cathedral was dark now, the only illumination a weird orange glow eking through the stained-glass windows. I thought for a moment it was the last strains of sunset, but then, as we dashed toward the exit, I caught a glimpse of the sky through the broken roof.

Night had fallen. The bombs were falling still, thudding like an irregular heartbeat.

We ran outside.

CHAPTER X

From where we stood, arrested in awe on the cathedral steps, it looked as if the whole city had caught fire. The sky was a panorama of orange flame bright enough to read by. The square where we’d chased pigeons was a smoking hole in the cobblestones. The sirens droned on, a soprano counterpoint to the bombs’ relentless bass, their pitch so eerily human it sounded like every soul in London had taken to their rooftops to cry out collective despair. Then awe gave way to fear and the urgency of self-preservation, and we rushed down the debris-strewn steps into the street — past the ruined square, around a double-decker bus that looked like it had been crushed in the fist of an angry giant — running I knew not where, nor cared, so long as it was away from the Feeling that grew stronger and sicker inside me with each passing moment.

I looked back at the telekinetic girl, pulling the blind brothers along by their hands while they clicked with their tongues. I thought of telling her to let the pigeon go so we could follow it — but what use would it be to find Miss Wren now, while hollows were chasing us? We’d reach her only to be slaughtered at her doorstep, and we’d put her life in danger, too. No, we had to lose the hollows first. Or better yet, kill them.

A man in a metal hat stuck his head out of a doorway and shouted, “You are advised to take cover!” then ducked back inside.

Sure, I thought, but where? Maybe we could hide in the debris and the chaos around us, and with so much noise and distraction everywhere, the hollows would pass us by. But we were still too close to them, our trail too fresh. I warned my friends not to use their abilities, no matter what, and Emma and I led them zigzagging through the streets, hoping this would make us harder to track.

Still, I could feel them coming. They were out in the open now, out of the cathedral, lurching after us, invisible to all but me. I wondered if even I would be able to see them here, in the dark: shadow creatures in a shadow city.

We ran until my lungs burned. Until Olive couldn’t keep up anymore and Bronwyn had to scoop her into her arms. Down long blocks of blacked-out windows staring like lidless eyes. Past a bombed library snowing ash and burning papers. Through a bombed cemetery, long-forgotten Londoners unearthed and flung into trees, grinning in rotted formal wear. A curlicued swing set in a cratered playground. The horrors piled up, incomprehensible, the bombers now and then dropping flares to light it all with the pure, shining white of a thousand camera flashes. As if to say: Look. Look what we made.

Nightmares come to life, all of it. Like the hollows themselves.

Don’t look don’t look don’t look …

I envied the blind brothers, navigating a mercifully detail-free topography; the world in wireframe. I wondered, briefly, what their dreams looked like — or if they dreamt at all.

Emma jogged alongside me, her wavy, powder-coated hair flowing behind her. “Everyone’s knackered,” she said. “We can’t keep going like this!”

She was right. Even the fittest of us were flagging now, and soon the hollows would catch up to us and we’d have to face them in the middle of the street. And that would be a bloodbath. We had to find cover.

I steered us toward a row of houses. Because bomber pilots were more likely to target a cheerfully lit house than another smudge in the dark, every house was blacked out — every porch light dark, every window opaque. An empty house would be safest for us, but blacked out like this, there was no way to tell which houses were occupied and which weren’t. We’d have to pick one at random.

I stopped us in the road.

“What are you doing?” Emma said, puffing to catch her breath.

“Are you mad?”

“Maybe,” I said, and then I grabbed Horace, swept my hand toward the row of houses, and said, “Choose.”

“What?” he said. “Why me?”

“Because I trust your random guesses more than my own.”

“But I never dreamed about this!” he protested.

“Maybe you did and don’t remember,” I said. “Choose.”

Realizing there was no way out of it, he swallowed hard, closed his eyes for a second, then turned and pointed to a house behind us. “That one.”

“Why that one?” I asked.

“Because you made me choose!” Horace said angrily.

That would have to do.

The front door was locked. No problem: Bronwyn wrenched off the knob and tossed it into the street, and the door creaked open on its own. We filed into a dark hallway lined with family photos, the faces impossible to make out. Bronwyn closed the door and blocked it with a table she found in the hall.

“Who’s there?” came a voice from further inside the house.

Damn. We weren’t alone. “You were supposed to pick an empty house,” I said to Horace.

“I’m going to hit you very hard,” Horace muttered.

There was no time to switch houses. We’d have to introduce ourselves to whoever was here and hope they were friendly.

“Who is there!” the voice demanded.

“We aren’t thieves or Germans or anything like that!” Emma said. “Just here to take cover!”

No response.

“Stay here,” Emma told the others, and then she pulled me after her down the hall. “We’re coming to say hello!” she called out, loud and friendly. “Don’t shoot us, please!”

We walked to the end of the hall and rounded a corner, and there, standing in a doorway, was a girl. She held a wicked-down lantern in one hand and a letter opener in the other, and her hard, black eyes flicked nervously between Emma and me. “There’s nothing of value here!” she said. “This house has been looted already.”

“I told you, we’re not thieves!” Emma said, offended.

“And I told you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll scream and … and my father will come running with his … guns and things!”

The girl looked at once childish and prematurely adult. She had her hair in a short bob and wore a little girl’s dress with big white buttons trailing down the front, but something in her stony expression made her seem older, world-weary at twelve or thirteen.

“Please don’t scream,” I said, thinking not about her probably fictitious father but about what other things might come running.

Then a small voice piped up behind her, through the doorway she’d been conspicuously blocking. “Who’s there, Sam?”

The girl’s face pinched in frustration. “Only some children,” she said. “I asked you to keep quiet, Esme.”

“Are they nice? I want to meet them!”

“They were just leaving.”

“There are lots of us and two of you,” Emma said matter-of-factly. “We’re staying here for a bit, and that’s that. You’re not going to scream, either, and we’re not going to steal anything.”

The girl’s eyes flashed with anger, then dulled. She knew she’d lost. “All right,” she said, “but try anything and I’ll scream and bury this in your belly.” She brandished the letter opener weakly, then lowered it to her waist.

“Fair enough,” I said.

“Sam?” said the little voice. “What’s happening now?”

The girl — Sam — stepped reluctantly aside, revealing a bathroom that danced with the flickering light of candles. There was a sink and a toilet and a bathtub, and in the bathtub a little girl of perhaps five. She peeped curiously at us over the rim. “This is my sister, Esme,” Sam said.

“Hullo!” said Esme, waggling a rubber duck at us. “Bombs can’t get you when you’re in the bath, did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” Emma replied.

“It’s her safe place,” Sam whispered. “We spend every raid in here.”

“Wouldn’t you be safer in a shelter?” I said.

“Those are awful places,” Sam said.

The others had tired of waiting and began coming down the hall. Bronwyn leaned through the doorway and waved hello.

“Come in!” Esme said, delighted.

“You’re too trusting,” Sam scolded her. “One day you’re going to meet a bad person and then you’ll be sorry.”

“They aren’t bad,” said Esme.

“You can’t tell just by looking.”

Then Hugh and Horace pressed their faces through the doorway, curious to see whom we’d met, and Olive scooted between their legs and sat in the middle of the floor, and pretty soon all of us were squeezed into the bathroom together, even Melina and the blind brothers, who stood creepily facing the corner. Seeing so many people, Sam’s legs shook and she sat down heavily on the toilet, overwhelmed — but her sister was thrilled, asking everyone’s name as they came in.

“Where are your parents?” Bronwyn asked.

“Father’s shooting bad people in the war,” Esme said proudly. She mimed holding a rifle and shouted, “Bang!”

Emma looked at Sam. “You said your father was upstairs,” she said flatly.

“You broke into our house,” Sam replied.

“True.”

“And your mother?” said Bronwyn. “Where is she?”

“A long time dead,” Sam said with no apparent feeling. “So when Father went to war they tried shipping us off to family elsewhere — and because Father’s sister in Devon is terribly mean and would only take one of us, they tried shipping Esme and me off to different places. But we jumped off the train and came back.”

“We won’t be split up,” Esme declared. “We’re sisters.”

“And you’re afraid if you go to a shelter they’ll find you?” Emma said. “Send you away?”

Sam nodded. “I won’t let that happen.”

“It’s safe in the tub,” said Esme. “Maybe you should get in, too. That way we’d all be safe.”

Bronwyn touched her hand to her heart. “Thank you, love, but we’d never fit!”

While the others talked, I turned my focus inward, trying to sense the hollows. They weren’t running anymore. The Feeling had stabilized, which meant they weren’t getting closer or farther away, but were probably sniffing around nearby. I took this as a good sign; if they knew where we were, they’d be coming straight for us. Our trail had gone cold. All we had to do was keep our heads down for a while, and then we could follow the pigeon to Miss Wren.

We huddled on the bathroom floor listening to bombs fall in other parts of the city. Emma found some rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet and insisted on cleaning and bandaging the cut on my head. Then Sam began to hum some tune I knew but couldn’t quite name, and Esme played with her duck in the tub, and ever so slowly, the Feeling began to diminish. For a scant few minutes, that twinkling bathroom became a world unto itself; a cocoon far away from trouble and war.

But the war outside refused to be ignored for long. Antiaircraft guns rattled. Shrapnel skittered like claws across the roof. The bombs drew closer until their reports were followed by lower, more ominous sounds — the dull thud of walls collapsing. Olive hugged herself. Horace put his fingers in his ears. The blind boys moaned and rocked on their feet. Miss Peregrine wriggled deep into the folds of Bronwyn’s coat and the pigeon trembled in Melina’s lap.

“What sort of madness have you led us into?” Melina said.

“I warned you,” Emma replied.

The water in Esme’s tub rippled with each blast. The little girl clutched her rubber duck and began to cry. Her sobs filled the little room. Sam hummed louder, pausing to whisper, “You’re safe, Esme, you’re safe in here,” between melody lines, but Esme only cried harder. Horace took his fingers out of his ears and tried to distract Esme by making shadow animals on the wall — a crocodile snapping its jaws, a bird flying — but she hardly noticed. Then, the last person I’d expect to care about making a little girl feel better scooted over to the tub.

“Look here,” Enoch said, “I have a little man who’d like to ride on your duck, and he’d just about fit, too.” From his pocket he took a clay homunculus figure, three inches tall, the last of those he’d made on Cairnholm. Esme’s sobs abated as she watched him bend the clay man’s legs and sit him on the edge of the tub. Then, with a press of Enoch’s thumb against the clay man’s tiny chest, he came to life. Esme’s face glowed with delight as the clay man sprang to his feet and strolled along the lip of the tub.

“Go on,” said Enoch. “Show her what you can do.”

The clay man jumped up and clicked his heels, then took an exaggerated bow. Esme laughed and clapped her hands, and when a bomb fell close by a moment later, causing the clay man to lose his balance and fall into the tub, she only laughed harder.

A sudden chill rolled up the back of my neck and prickled my scalp, and then the Feeling came over me so swiftly and sharply that I groaned and doubled over where I sat. The others saw me and knew instantly what it meant.

They were coming. They were coming very quickly.

Of course they were: Enoch had used his power, and I hadn’t even thought to stop him. We might as well have sent up a signal flare.

I staggered to my feet, the pain attacking me in debilitating waves. I tried to shout — Go, run! Run out the back! — but couldn’t force the words. Emma put her hands on my shoulders. “Collect yourself, love, we need you!”

Then something was beating at the front door, each impact echoing through the house. “They’re here!” I finally managed to say, but the sound of the door shaking on its hinges had said it for me.

Everyone scrambled to their feet and squeezed into the hall in a panicked knot. Only Sam and Esme stayed put, baffled and cowering. Emma and I had to pry Bronwyn away from the tub. “We can’t just leave them!” she cried as we dragged her toward the door.

“Yes, we can!” said Emma. “They’ll be all right — they aren’t the ones the hollows are after!”

I knew that was true, but I also knew the hollows would tear apart anything in their path, including a couple of normal girls.

Bronwyn struck the wall in anger, leaving a fist-shaped hole.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the girls, then let Emma push her into the hall.

I hobbled after them, my stomach writhing. “Lock this door and don’t open it for anyone!” I shouted, then looked back to catch a last glimpse of Sam’s face, framed in the closing door, her eyes big and scared.

I heard a window smash in the front hall. Some suicidal curiosity made me peek around the corner. Squirming through the blackout curtains was a mass of tentacles.

Then Emma took my arm and yanked me away — down another hall — into a kitchen — out the back door — into an ash-dusted garden — down an alley where the others were running in a loose group. Then someone said “Look, look!” and, still running, I swiveled to see a great white bird fluttering high above the street. Enoch said, “Mine — it’s a mine!” and what had seemed like gossamer wings resolved suddenly and clearly into a parachute, the fat silver body hanging below it packed with explosives; an angel of death floating serenely toward earth.

The hollows burst outside. I could see them distantly, loping through the garden, tongues waving in the air.

The mine landed by the house with a gentle clink.

“Get down!” I screamed.

We never had a chance to run for cover. I’d only just hit the ground when there was a blinding flash and a sound like the earth ripping open and a shock wave of searing hot wind that knocked the air from my lungs. Then a black hail of debris whipped hard against my back and I hugged my knees to my chest, making myself as compact as I could.

After that, there was only wind and sirens and a ringing in my ears. I gasped for air and choked on the swirling dust. Pulling the collar of my sweater up over my nose and mouth to filter it, I slowly caught my breath.

I counted my limbs: two arms, two legs.

Good.

I sat up slowly and looked around. I couldn’t see much through the dust, but I heard my friends calling out for one another. There was Horace’s voice, and Bronwyn’s. Hugh’s. Millard’s.

Where was Emma?

I shouted her name. Tried to get up and fell back again. My legs were intact but shaking; they wouldn’t take my weight.

I shouted again. “Emma!”

“I’m here!”

My head snapped toward her voice. She materialized through the smoke.

“Jacob! Oh, God. Thank God.”

Both of us were shaking. I put my arms around her, running my hands over her body to make sure she was all there.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Yes. Are you?”

My ears hurt and my lungs ached and my back stung where I’d been pelted by debris, but the pain in my stomach was gone. The moment the blast went off, it was as if someone had flipped a switch inside me, and just like that, the Feeling had vanished.

The hollows had been vaporized.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

Aside from scrapes and cuts, so were the rest of us. We staggered together in a cluster and compared injuries. All were minor. “It’s some kind of miracle,” Emma said, shaking her head in disbelief.

It seemed even more so when we realized that everywhere around us were nails and bits of concrete and knifelike splinters of wood, many of them driven inches into the ground by the blast.

Enoch wobbled to a car parked nearby, its windows smashed, its frame so pocked with shrapnel that it looked like it had been sprayed by a machine gun. “We should be dead,” he marveled, poking his finger into one of the holes. “Why aren’t we full of holes?”

Hugh said, “Your shirt, mate,” then went to Enoch and plucked a crumpled nail from the back of his grit-encrusted sweater.

“And yours,” said Enoch, pulling a jagged spike of metal from

Hugh’s.

Then we all checked our sweaters. Embedded in each were long shards of glass and pieces of metal that should have passed right through our bodies — but hadn’t. Our itchy, ill-fitting, peculiar sweaters weren’t fireproof or waterproof, as the emu-raffe had guessed. They were bulletproof. And they had saved our lives.

“I never dreamed I’d owe my life to such an appalling article of clothing,” said Horace, testing the sweater’s wool between his fingers. “I wonder if I could make a tuxedo jacket out of it instead.”

Then Melina appeared, pigeon on her shoulder, blind brothers at her side. With their sonarlike senses, the brothers had discovered a low wall of reinforced concrete — it had sounded hard — and pulled Melina behind it just as the bomb exploded. That left only the two normal girls unaccounted for. But as the dust settled and their house came into view — or what was left of it — any hope of finding them alive seemed to fade. The upper floor had collapsed, pancaking down onto the lower. What remained was a skeletal wreck of exposed beams and smoking rubble.

Bronwyn took off running toward it anyway, shouting the sisters’ names. Numbly, I watched her go.

“We could’ve helped them and we didn’t,” Emma said miserably. “We left them to die.”

“It wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference,” Millard said. “Their deaths had been written into history. Even if we’d saved their lives today, something else would’ve taken them tomorrow. Another bomb. A bus crash. They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere.”

“Which is why you can’t go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening,” said Enoch. “History heals itself. Isn’t that interesting?”

“No,” Emma snapped, “and you’re a heartless bastard for talking about killing babies at a time like this. Or ever.”

“Baby Hitler,” said Enoch. “And talking loop theory is better than going into pointless hysterics.” He was looking at Bronwyn, who was climbing the rubble, digging in the wreckage, flinging debris this way and that.

She turned and waved her arms at us. “Over here!” she cried.

Enoch shook his head. “Someone please retrieve her. We’ve got an ymbryne to find.”

“Over here!” Bronwyn shouted, louder this time. “I can hear one of them!”

Emma looked at me. “Wait. What did she say?”

And then we were all running to meet her.

We found the little girl beneath a slab of broken ceiling. It had fallen across the bathtub, which was wrecked but had not entirely collapsed. Cowering inside was Esme — wet, filthy, and traumatized — but alive. The tub had protected her, just like her sister promised it would.

Bronwyn lifted the slab enough for Emma to reach in and pull Esme out. She clung to Emma, trembling and weeping. “Where’s my sister?” she said. “Where’s Sam?”

“Hush, baby, hush,” Emma said, rocking her back and forth.

“We’re going to get you to a hospital. Sam will be along later.” That was a lie, of course, and I could see Emma’s heart breaking as she told it. That we had survived and the little girl had also were two miracles in one night. To expect a third seemed greedy.

But then a third miracle did happen, or something like one: her sister answered.

“I’m here, Esme!” came a voice from above.

“Sam!” the little girl shouted, and we all looked up.

Sam was dangling from a wooden beam in the rafters. The beam was broken and hung down at a forty-five-degree angle. Sam was near the low end, but still too high for any of us to reach.

“Let go!” Emma said. “We’ll catch you!”

“I can’t!”

Then I looked more closely and saw why she couldn’t, and I nearly fainted.

Sam’s arms and legs were dangling free. She wasn’t hanging onto the beam, but from it. She’d been impaled through the center of her body. And yet her eyes were open, and she was blinking alertly in our direction.

“I appear to be stuck,” she said calmly.

I was sure Sam would die at any moment. She was in shock, so she felt no pain, but pretty soon the adrenaline pumping through her system would dissipate, and she’d fade, and be gone.

“Someone get my sister down!” Esme cried.

Bronwyn went after her. She climbed a crumbling staircase to the ruined ceiling, then reached out to grab onto the beam. She pulled and pulled, and with her great strength was able to angle the beam downward until the broken end was nearly touching the rubble below. This allowed Enoch and Hugh to reach Sam’s dangling legs and, very gently, slide her forward until she came free with a soft ploop! and landed on her feet.

Sam regarded the hole in her chest dully. It was nearly six inches in diameter and perfectly round, like the beam she’d been impaled on, and yet it didn’t seem to concern her much.

Esme broke away from Emma and ran to her sister. “Sam!” she cried, throwing her arms around the injured girl’s waist. “Thank Heaven you’re all right!”

“I don’t think she is!” Olive said. “I don’t think she is at all!”

But Sam worried only for Esme, not for herself. Once she’d hugged the stuffing out of her, Sam knelt down and held the little girl at arm’s length, scanning for cuts and bruises. “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.

“My ears are ringy. I scraped my knees. And I got some dirt in my eye …”

Then Esme began to tremble and cry, the shock of what had happened overcoming her again. Sam hugged her close, saying, “There, there …”

It made no sense that Sam’s body was functioning in any capacity. Stranger still, her wound wasn’t even bleeding, and there was no gore or little bits of entrails hanging out of it, like I knew to expect from horror movies. Instead, Sam looked like a paper doll that had been attacked with a giant hole-punch.

Though everyone was dying for an explanation, we had elected to give the girls a moment to themselves, and stared in amazement from a respectful distance.

Enoch, however, paid them no such courtesy. “Excuse me,” he said, crowding into their personal space, “but could you please explain how it is that you’re alive?”

“It’s nothing serious,” Sam said. “Although my dress may not survive.”

“Nothing serious?!” said Enoch. “I can see clear through you!”

“It does smart a little,” she admitted, “but it’ll fill in in a day or so. Things like this always do.”

Enoch laughed dementedly. “Things like this?”

“In the name of all that’s peculiar,” Millard said quietly. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

“She’s one of us,” I said.

We had questions. Lots of questions. As Esme’s tears began to fade, we worked up the courage to ask them.

Did Sam realize she was peculiar?

She knew she was different, she said, but had never heard the term peculiar.

Had she ever lived in a loop?

She had not (“A what?”), which meant she was just as old as she appeared to be. Twelve, she said.

Had no ymbryne ever come to find her?

“Someone came once,” she answered. “There were others like me, but to join them I would’ve had to leave Esme behind.”

“Esme can’t … do anything?” I asked.

“I can count backward from one hundred in a duck voice,” Esme volunteered through her sniffles, and then began to demonstrate, quacking: “One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight …”

Before she could get any further, Esme was interrupted by a siren, this one high-pitched and moving fast in our direction. An ambulance careened into the alley and raced toward us, its headlights blacked out so that only pinpricks of light shone through. It skidded to a stop nearby, cut its siren, and a driver leapt out.

“Is anyone hurt?” the driver said, rushing over to us. He wore a rumpled gray uniform and a dented metal hat, and though he was full of energy, his face looked haggard, like he hadn’t slept in days.

His eyes met the hole in Sam’s chest, and he stopped dead in his tracks. “Cor blimey!”

Sam got to her feet. “It’s nothing, really!” she said. “I’m fine!” And to demonstrate how fine she was, she passed her fist in and out of the hole a few times and did a jumping jack.

The medic fainted.

“Hm,” said Hugh, nudging the fallen man with his foot. “You’d think these chaps would be made of tougher stuff.”

“Since he’s clearly unfit for service, I say we borrow his ambulance,” Enoch said. “There’s no knowing where in the city that pigeon’s leading us. If it’s far, it could take us all night to reach Miss Wren on foot.”

Horace, who’d been sitting on a chunk of wall, sprang to his feet. “That’s a fine idea!” he said.

“It’s a reprehensible idea!” Bronwyn said. “You can’t steal an ambulance — injured persons need it!”

“We’re injured persons,” Horace whined. “We need it!”

“It’s hardly the same thing!”

“Saint Bronwyn!” Enoch said sarcastically. “Are you so concerned with the well-being of normals that you’d risk Miss Peregrine’s life to protect a few of theirs? A thousand of them aren’t worth one of her! Or one of us, for that matter!”

Bronwyn gasped. “What a thing to say in front of …”

Sam stalked toward Enoch with a humorless look on her face.

“Look here, boy,” she said, “if you imply that my sister’s life is worthless again, I will clobber you.”

“Calm down, I wasn’t referring to your sister. I only meant that …”

“I know exactly what you meant. And I’ll clobber you if you say it again.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve offended your delicate sensibilities,” Enoch said, his voice rising in exasperation, “but you’ve never had an ymbryne and you’ve never lived in a loop, and so you couldn’t possibly understand that this — right now — is not real, strictly speaking. It’s the past. The life of every normal in this city has already been lived. Their fates are predetermined, no matter how many ambulances we steal! So it doesn’t bloody matter, you see.”

Looking a bit baffled, Sam said nothing, but continued to give Enoch the evil eye.

“Even so,” said Bronwyn. “It’s not right to make people suffer unnecessarily. We can’t take the ambulance!”

“That’s all well and good, but think of Miss Peregrine!” said Millard. “She can’t have more than a day left.”

Our group seemed evenly divided between stealing the ambulance or going on foot, so we put it to a vote. I myself was against taking it, but mostly because the roads were so pocked with bomb holes that I didn’t know how we’d drive the thing.

Emma took the vote. “Who’s for taking the ambulance?” she said.

A few hands shot up.

“And against?”

Suddenly there was a loud pop from the direction of the ambulance, and we all turned to see Miss Peregrine standing by as one of its rear tires hissed air. Miss Peregrine had voted with her beak — by stabbing it into the ambulance’s tire. Now no one could use it — not us, not injured persons — and there was no point in arguing or delaying any further.

“Well, that simplifies things,” said Millard. “We go on foot.”

“Miss Peregrine!” Bronwyn cried. “How could you?”

Ignoring Bronwyn’s indignation, Miss Peregrine hopped over to Melina, looked up at the pigeon on her shoulder, and screeched. The message was clear: Let’s go already!

What could we do? Time was wasting.

“Come with us,” Emma said to Sam. “If there’s any justice in the world, we’ll be somewhere safe before the night is through.”

“I told you, I won’t leave my sister behind,” Sam replied.

“You’re going to one of those places she can’t enter, aren’t you?”

“I–I don’t know,” Emma stammered. “It’s possible …”

“I don’t care either way,” Sam said coldly. “After what I just saw, I wouldn’t so much as cross the road with you.”

Emma drew back, going a bit pale. In a small voice she asked, “Why?”

“If even outcasts and downtrodden folk like yourselves can’t muster a bit of compassion for others,” she said, “then there’s no hope for this world.” And she turned away and carried Esme toward the ambulance.

Emma reacted as if she’d been slapped, her cheeks going red. She ran after Sam. “We don’t all think the way Enoch does! And as for our ymbryne, I’m sure she didn’t mean to do what she did!”

Sam spun to face her. “That was no accident! I’m glad my sister’s not like all of you. Wish to God I wasn’t.”

She turned away again, and this time Emma didn’t follow. With wounded eyes she watched Sam go, then slouched after the others. Somehow the olive branch she’d extended had turned into a snake and bitten her.

Bronwyn peeled off her sweater and set it down on the rubble. “Next time bombs start falling, have your sister wear this,” she called to Sam. “It’ll keep her safer than any bathtub.”

Sam said nothing; didn’t even look. She was bending over the ambulance driver, who was sitting up now and mumbling, “I had the queerest dream …”

“That was a stupid thing to do,” Enoch said to Bronwyn.

“Now you don’t have a sweater.”

“Shut your fat gob,” Bronwyn replied. “If you’d ever done a nice thing for another person, you might understand.”

“I did do something nice for another person,” Enoch said, “and it nearly got us eaten by hollows!”

We mumbled goodbyes that went unreturned and slipped quietly into the shadows. Melina took the pigeon from her shoulder and tossed it skyward. It flew a short distance before a string she’d tied around its foot snapped taut and it hovered, caught in the air, like a dog straining at its lead. “Miss Wren’s this way,” Melina said, nodding in the direction the bird was pulling, and we followed the girl and her pigeon friend down the alley.

I was about to assume hollow-watch, my now-customary position near the head of the group, when something made me glance back at the sisters. I turned in time to see Sam lift Esme into the ambulance, then bend forward to plant a kiss on each of her scraped knees. I wondered what would happen to them. Later, Millard would tell me that the fact that none of them had ever heard of Sam — and someone with such a unique peculiarity would’ve been well known — meant she probably had not survived the war.

The whole episode had really gotten to Emma. I don’t know why it was so important for her to prove to a stranger that we were good-hearted, when we knew ourselves to be — but the suggestion that we were anything less than angels walking the earth, that our natures were more complexly shaded, seemed to bother her. “They don’t understand,” she kept saying.

Then again, I thought, maybe they do.

CHAPTER XI

So it had come to this: everything depended on a pigeon. Whether we would end the night in the womblike safety of an ymbryne’s care or half chewed in the churning black of a hollow’s guts; whether Miss Peregrine would be saved or we’d wander lost through this hellscape until her clock ran out; whether I would live to see my home or my parents again — it all depended on one scrawny, peculiar pigeon.

I walked at the front of the group, feeling for hollows, but it was really the pigeon who led us, tugging on its leash like a bloodhound after a scent. We turned left when the bird flew left, and right when it jerked right, obedient as sheep even when it meant fumbling down streets cratered with ankle-breaking bomb holes or bristling with the bones of dismembered buildings, their jagged iron spear tips lurking dimly in the wavering fire glow, angled at our throats.

Coming down from the terrifying events of that evening, I’d reached a new low of exhaustion. My head tingled strangely. My feet dragged. The rumble of bombs had quieted and the sirens had finally wound down, and I wondered if all that apocalyptic noise had been keeping me awake. Now the smoky air was alive with subtler sounds: water gushing from broken mains, the whine of a trapped dog, hoarse voices moaning for help. Occasionally fellow travelers would materialize out of the dark, wraithlike figures escaped from some lower world, eyes shining with fear and suspicion, clutching random things in their arms — radios, looted silver, a gilt box, a funerary urn. Dead bearing the dead.

We came to a T in the road and stopped, the pigeon deliberating between left and right. The girl murmured encouragements: “Come on, Winnie. There’s a good pigeon. Show us the way.”

Enoch leaned in and whispered, “If you don’t find Miss Wren, I will personally roast you on a spit.”

The bird leapt into the air, urging left.

Melina glowered at Enoch. “You’re an ass,” she said.

“I get results,” he replied.

Eventually we arrived at an underground station. The pigeon led us through its arched entry into a ticket lobby, and I was about to say We’re taking the subway — smart bird, when I realized the lobby was deserted and the ticket booth shuttered. Though it didn’t look like trains would be visiting this station anytime soon, we forged ahead regardless, through an unchained gate, along a hallway lined with peeling notices and chipped white tiles, to a deep staircase where we spiraled down and down into the city’s humming, electric-lit belly.

At each landing, we had to step around sleeping people wrapped in blankets: lone sleepers at first, then groups lying like scattered matchsticks, and then, as we reached bottom, an unbroken human tide that swept across the underground platform — hundreds of people squeezed between a wall and the tracks, curled on the floor, sprawled on benches, sunk into folding chairs. Those who weren’t sleeping rocked babies in their arms, read paperbacks, played cards, prayed. They weren’t waiting for a train; no trains were coming. They were refugees from the bombs, and this was their shelter.

I tried sensing for hollows, but there were too many faces, too many shadows. Luck, if we had any left, would have to sustain us for a while.

Now what?

We needed directions from the pigeon, but it seemed briefly confused — like me, it was probably overwhelmed by the crowd — so we stood and waited, the breaths and snores and mumbles of the sleepers murmuring weirdly around us.

After a minute the pigeon stiffened and flew toward the tracks, then reached the end of its leash and bounced back into Melina’s hand like a yo-yo.

We tiptoed around the bodies to the edge of the platform, then hopped down into the pit where the tracks ran. They disappeared into tunnels on either end of the station. I had a sinking feeling that our future lay somewhere inside one of these dark, gaping mouths.

“Oh, I hope we don’t have to go mucking about in there,” said

Olive.

“Of course we do,” Enoch said. “It isn’t a proper holiday until we’ve plumbed every available sewer.”

The pigeon bopped rightward. We started down the tracks.

I hopscotched around an oily puddle and a legion of rats scurried away from my feet, sending Olive into Bronwyn’s arms with a shriek. The tunnel yawned before us, black and menacing. It occurred to me that this would be a very bad place to meet a hollowgast. Here there’d be no walls to climb, no houses to shelter in, no tomb lids to close behind us. It was long and straight and lit only by a few red bulbs, glinting feebly at scattered intervals.

I walked faster.

The darkness closed around us.

When I was a kid, I used to play hide-and-seek with my dad. I was always the hider and he the seeker. I was really good at it, primarily because I, unlike most kids of four or five, had the then-peculiar ability to be extremely quiet for long periods of time, and also because I suffered from absolutely no trace of anything resembling claustrophobia: I could wedge myself into the smallest rear-closet crawl space and stay there for twenty or thirty minutes, not making a sound, having the time of my life.

Which is why you’d think I wouldn’t have a problem with the whole dark, enclosed spaces thing. Or why, at the very least, you’d think a tunnel meant to contain trains and tracks and nothing else would be easier for me to handle than one that was essentially an open cemetery, with all manner of Halloweenish things spilling out along it. And yet, the farther into this tunnel we walked, the more I was overcome by clammy, creeping dread — a feeling entirely apart from the one I sensed hollows with; this was simply a bad feeling. And so I hurried us through as fast as the slowest of us could go, prodding Melina until she barked at me to back off, a steady drip of adrenaline keeping my deep exhaustion at bay.

After a long walk and several Y-shaped tunnel splits, the pigeon led us to a disused section of track where the ties had warped and rotted and pools of stagnant water spanned the floor. The pressure of trains passing in far-off tunnels pushed the air around like breaths in some great creature’s gullet.

Then, way down ahead of us, a pinpoint of light winked into being, small but growing fast. Emma shouted, “Train!” and we split apart and pressed our backs to the walls. I covered my ears, expecting the deafening roar of a train engine at close range, but it never came — all I could hear was a small, high-pitched whine, which I was fairly certain was coming from inside my own head. Just as the light was filling the tunnel, its white glow surrounding us, I felt a sudden pressure in my ears and the light disappeared.

We stumbled away from the walls in a daze. Now the tracks and ties under our feet were new, as if they’d just been laid. The tunnel smelled somewhat less intensely of urine. The bulbs along it had gotten brighter, and instead of giving a steady light, they flickered — because they weren’t electric bulbs at all, but gaslamps.

“What just happened?” I said.

“We crossed into a loop,” said Emma. “But what was that light? I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“Every loop entrance has its quirks,” said Millard.

“Anyone know when we are?” I asked.

“I’d guess the latter half of the nineteenth century,” said Millard. “Prior to 1863 there wasn’t an underground system in London at all.”

Then, from behind us, another light appeared — this one accompanied by a gust of hot wind and a thunderous roar. “Train!” Emma shouted again, and this time it really was. We threw ourselves against the walls as it shot past in a cyclone of noise and light and belching smoke. It looked less like a modern subway train than a miniature locomotive. It even had a caboose, where a man with a big black beard and a guttering lantern in his hand gaped at us in surprise as the train strafed away around the next bend.

Hugh’s cap had blown off his head and been crushed. He went to pick it up, found it shredded, and threw it down again angrily. “I don’t care for this loop,” he said. “We’ve been here all of ten seconds and already it’s trying to kill us. Let’s do what we have to and get gone.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Enoch.

The pigeon guided us on down the track. After ten minutes or so, it stopped, pulling toward what looked like a blank wall. We couldn’t understand why, until I looked up and noticed a partially camouflaged door where the wall met the ceiling, twenty feet overhead. Because there seemed no other way to reach it, Olive took off her shoes and floated up to get a closer look. “There’s a lock on it,” she said. “A combination lock.”

There was also a pigeon-sized hole rusted through the door’s bottom corner, but that was no help to us — we needed the combination.

“Any idea what it could be?” Emma asked, putting the question out to everyone.

She was met with shrugs and blank looks.

“None,” said Millard.

“We’ll have to guess,” she said.

“Perhaps it’s my birthday,” said Enoch. “Try three — twelve — ninety-two.”

“Why would anyone know your birthday?” said Hugh.

Enoch frowned. “Just try it.”

Olive spun the dial back and forth, then tried the lock. “Sorry, Enoch.”

“What about our loop day?” Horace suggested. “Nine — three — forty.”

That didn’t work, either.

“It’s not going to be something easy to guess, like a date,” said Millard. “That would defeat the purpose of having a lock.”

Olive began to try random combinations. We stood by watching, growing more anxious with each failed attempt. Meanwhile, Miss Peregrine slipped quietly from Bronwyn’s coat and hopped over to the pigeon, who was waddling around at the end of its lead, pecking at the ground. When it saw Miss Peregrine, it tried to hop away, but the headmistress followed, making a low, vaguely threatening warble in her throat.

The pigeon flapped its wings and flew up to Melina’s shoulder, out of Miss Peregrine’s reach. Miss Peregrine stood by Melina’s feet, squawking at it. This seemed to make the pigeon extremely nervous.

“Miss P, what are you up to?” said Emma.

“I think she wants something from your bird,” I said to Melina.

“If the pigeon knows the way,” said Millard, “perhaps it knows the combination, too.”

Miss Peregrine turned toward him and squawked, then looked back at the pigeon and squawked louder. The pigeon tried to hide behind Melina’s neck.

“Perhaps the pigeon knows the combination but doesn’t know how to tell us,” said Bronwyn, “but it could tell Miss Peregrine, because both of them speak bird language, and then Miss Peregrine could tell us.”

“Make your pigeon talk to our bird,” said Enoch.

“Your bird’s twice Winnie’s size and sharp on three ends,” Melina said, backing away a step. “She’s scared and I don’t blame her.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” said Emma. “Miss P would never hurt another bird. It’s against the ymbryne code.”

Melina’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “That bird is an ymbryne?”

“She’s our headmistress!” said Bronwyn. “Alma LeFay Peregrine.”

“Full of surprises, ain’t you?” Melina said, then laughed in a way that wasn’t exactly friendly. “If you’ve got an ymbryne right there, what d’you need to find another one for?”

“It’s a long story,” said Millard. “Suffice to say, our ymbryne needs help that only another ymbryne can give.”

“Just put the blasted pigeon on the ground so Miss P can talk to it!” said Enoch.

Finally, reluctantly, Melina agreed. “Come on, Winnie, there’s a good girl.” She lifted the pigeon from her shoulder and placed it gently at her feet, then pinned its leash under her shoe so it couldn’t fly away.

Everyone circled around to watch as Miss Peregrine advanced on the pigeon. It tried to run but was caught short by the leash. Miss Peregrine got right in its face, warbling and clucking. It was like watching an interrogation. The pigeon tucked its head under its wing and began to tremble.

Then Miss Peregrine pecked it on the head.

“Hey!” said Melina. “Stop that!”

The pigeon kept its head tucked and didn’t respond, so Miss Peregrine pecked it again, harder.

“That’s enough!” Melina said, and lifting her shoe from the leash, she reached down for the pigeon. Before she could get her fingers around it, though, Miss Peregrine severed the leash with a quick slash of her talons, clamped down with her beak on one of the pigeon’s twiggy legs, and bounded away, the pigeon screeching and flailing.

Melina freaked out. “Come back here!” she shouted, furious, about to run after the birds when Bronwyn caught her by the arms.

“Wait!” said Bronwyn. “I’m sure Miss P knows what she’s doing …”

Miss Peregrine stopped a little way down the track, well out of anyone’s reach. The pigeon struggled in her beak, and Melina struggled against Bronwyn, both in vain. Miss Peregrine seemed to be waiting for the pigeon to tire out and give up, but then she got impatient and began swinging the pigeon around in the air by its leg.

“Please, Miss P!” Olive shouted. “You’ll kill it!”

I was close to rushing over and breaking it up myself, but the birds were a blur of talons and beaks, and no one could get close enough to separate them. We yelled and begged Miss Peregrine to stop.

Finally, she did. The pigeon dropped from her mouth and wobbled on its feet, too stunned to flee. Miss Peregrine warbled at it the way she had earlier, and this time the pigeon chirped in response. Then Miss Peregrine tapped the ground with her beak three times, then ten times, then five.

Three — ten — five. Olive tried the combination. The lock popped open, the door swung inward, and a rope ladder unrolled down the wall to meet the floor.

Miss Peregrine’s interrogation had worked. She’d done what she needed to do to help us all, and given that, we might’ve overlooked her behavior — if not for what happened next. She took the dazed pigeon by its leg again and, seemingly out of spite, flung it hard against the wall.

We reacted with a great collective gasp of horror. I was shocked beyond speaking.

Melina broke away from Bronwyn and ran to pick up the pigeon. It hung limply from her hand, its neck broken.

“Oh my bird, she’s killed it!” cried Bronwyn.

“All we went through to catch that thing,” said Hugh, “and now look.”

“I’m going to stomp your ymbryne’s head!” Melina shrieked, crazed with rage.

Bronwyn caught her arms again. “No, you’re not! Stop it!”

“Your ymbryne’s a savage! If that’s how she conducts herself, we’re better off with the wights!”

“You take that back!” shouted Hugh.

“I won’t!” Melina said.

More harsh words were exchanged. A fistfight was narrowly avoided. Bronwyn held Melina, and Emma and I held Hugh, until the fight went out of them, if not the bitterness.

No one could quite believe what Miss Peregrine had done.

“What’s the big fuss?” said Enoch. “It was just a stupid pigeon.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Emma, scolding Miss Peregrine directly.

“That bird was a personal friend of Miss Wren’s. It was hundreds of years old. It was written about in the Tales. And now it’s dead.”

“Murdered,” said Melina, and she spat on the ground. “That’s what it’s called when you kill something for no reason.”

Miss Peregrine nibbled casually at a mite under her wing, as if she hadn’t heard any of this.

“Something wicked’s gotten into her,” said Olive. “This isn’t like Miss Peregrine at all.”

“She’s changing,” said Hugh. “Becoming more animal.”

“I hope there’s still something human left in her to rescue,” Millard said darkly.

So did we all.

We climbed out of the tunnel, each of us lost in our own anxious thoughts.

Beyond the door was a passage that led to a flight of steps that led to another passage and another door, which opened onto a room filled with daylight and packed to the rafters with clothes: racks and closets and wardrobes stuffed with them. There were also two wooden privacy screens to change behind, some freestanding mirrors, and a worktable laid out with sewing machines and bolts of raw fabric. It was half boutique, half workshop — and a paradise to Horace, who practically cartwheeled inside, crying, “I’m in Heaven!”

Melina lurked sullenly at the rear, not speaking to anyone.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“It’s a disguising room,” Millard answered, “designed to help visiting peculiars blend in with this loop’s normals.” He pointed out a framed illustration demonstrating how clothes of the period were worn.

“When in Rome!” said Horace, bounding toward a rack of clothes.

Emma asked everyone to change. In addition to helping us blend in, new clothes might also throw off any wights who’d been tracking us. “But keep your sweaters on underneath, in case more trouble finds us.”

Bronwyn and Olive took some plain-looking dresses behind a screen. I traded my ash-coated, sweat-stained pants and jacket for a mismatched but relatively clean suit. Instantly uncomfortable, I wondered how, for so many centuries, people wore such stiff, formal clothes all the time.

Millard put on a sharp-looking outfit and sat down in front of a mirror. “How do I look?” he said.

“Like an invisible boy wearing clothes,” replied Horace.

Millard sighed, lingered in front of the mirror a bit longer, then stripped and disappeared again.

Horace’s initial excitement had already waned. “The selection here is atrocious,” he complained. “If the clothes aren’t moth-eaten, they’re patched with clashing fabric! I am so weary of looking like a street urchin.”

“Street urchins blend,” Emma said from behind her changing screen. “Little gents in top hats do not.” She emerged wearing shiny red flats and a short-sleeved blue dress that fell just below the knee.

“What do you think?” she said, twirling to make the dress billow.

She looked like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, only cuter. I didn’t know how to tell her this in front of everybody, though, so instead I gave her an awkward grin and a thumbs-up.

She laughed. “Like it? Well, that’s too bad,” she said with a coy smile. “I’d stick out like a sore thumb.” Then a pained expression crossed her face, as if she felt guilty for laughing — for having had even a moment of fun, given all that had happened to us and everything yet to be resolved — and she ducked behind the screen again.

I felt it, too: the dread, the weight of the horrors we’d seen, which replayed themselves in an endless, lurid loop in my mind. But you can’t feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you’ve forgotten. It just means you’re human. But I didn’t know how to say this, either.

When she came out again, she had on a sacklike blouse with ripped sleeves and a broomstick skirt that brushed the top of her feet. (Much more urchin like.) She’d kept the red shoes, though. Emma could never resist a touch of glitter, however small.

“And this?” said Horace, waving a poofy orange wig he’d found.

“How’s this going to help anyone ‘blend in with the normals’?”

“Because it seems we’re going to a carnival,” said Hugh, looking up at a poster on the wall that advertised one.

“Just a moment!” Horace said, joining Hugh beneath the poster. “I’ve heard of this place! It’s an old tourist loop.”

“What’s a tourist loop?” I asked.

“Used to be you could find them all across peculiardom,” Millard explained, “placed strategically at times and locations of historical import. They made up a sort of Grand Tour that was once considered an essential part of any well-bred peculiar’s education. This was many years ago, of course, when it was still relatively safe to travel abroad. I didn’t realize there were any left.”

Then he got quiet, lost in memories of a better time.

When we’d all finished changing, we left our twentieth-century clothes in a heap and followed Emma through another door, out into an alleyway stacked with trash and empty crates. I recognized the sounds of a carnival in the distance: the arrhythmic wheeze of pipe organs, the dull roar of a crowd. Even through my nerves and exhaustion, I felt a jangle of excitement. Once, this was something peculiars had come from far and wide to see. My parents had never even taken me to Disney World.

Emma gave the usual instructions: “Stay together. Watch Jacob and me for signals. Don’t talk to anyone, and look no one in the eye.”

“How will we know where to go?” asked Olive.

“We’ll have to think like ymbrynes,” Emma said. “If you were Miss Wren, where would you be hiding?”

“Anywhere but London?” said Enoch.

“If only someone hadn’t murdered the pigeon,” Bronwyn said, staring bitterly at Miss Peregrine.

The headmistress stood on the cobblestones looking up at us, but no one wanted to touch her. We had to keep her out of sight, though, so Horace went back into the disguising room and fetched a denim sack. Miss Peregrine wasn’t enthusiastic about this arrangement, but when it became clear that no one was going to pick her up — least of all Bronwyn, who seemed entirely disgusted with her — she climbed inside and let Horace knot the top closed with a strip of leather.

We followed the drunken sound of the carnival through a snarl of cramped lanes, where from wooden carts vendors hawked vegetables and dusty sacks of grain and freshly killed rabbits; where children and thin cats skulked and prowled with hungry eyes, and women with proud, dirty faces squatted in the gutter peeling potatoes, building little mountains with the tossed-away skins. Though we tried very hard to slink by unnoticed, every one of them seemed to turn and stare as we passed: the vendors, the children, the women, the cats, the dead, milk-eyed rabbits swinging by their legs.

Even in my new, period-appropriate clothes, I felt transparently out of place. Blending in was as much about performance as about costume, I realized, and my friends and I carried ourselves with none of the slump-shouldered, shifty-eyed attitude that these people did. In the future, if I wanted to disguise myself as effectively as the wights, I’d have to sharpen my acting skills.

The carnival grew louder as we went, and the smells stronger — overcooked meats, roasting nuts, horse manure, human manure, and the smoke from coal fires all mixing together into something so sickly sweet that it thickened the very air. Finally, we reached a wide square where the carnival was in full, rollicking swing, packed with masses of people and brightly colored tents and more activity than my eyes could take in at once. The whole scene was an assault on my senses. There were acrobats and ropedancers and knife-throwers and fire-eaters and street performers of every type. A quack doctor pitched patent medicines from the back of a wagon: “A rare cordial to fortify the innards against infective parasites, unwholesome damps, and malignant effluvia!” Competing for attention on an adjacent stage was a loudmouthed showman in coattails and a large, prehistoric-looking creature whose gray skin hung from its frame in cascading wrinkles. It took me ten full seconds, as we threaded the crowd past the stage, to recognize it as a bear. It had been shaved and tied to a chair and made to wear a woman’s dress, and as its eyes bulged in its head, the showman grinned and pretended to serve it tea, shouting, “Ladies and gentlemen! Presenting the most beautiful lady in all of Wales!”—which earned him a big laugh from the crowd. I half hoped it would break its chains and eat him, right there in front of everyone.

To combat the dizzying effect of all this dreamlike madness, I reached into my pocket to palm the smooth glass of my phone, eyes closed for a moment, and whispered to myself, “I am a time traveler. This is real. I, Jacob Portman, am traveling in time.”

This was astonishing enough. More astonishing, perhaps, was the fact that time travel hadn’t broken my brain; that by some miracle, I had not yet devolved into a gibbering crazy person ranting on a street corner. The human psyche was much more flexible than I’d imagined, capable of expanding to contain all sorts of contradictions and seeming impossibilities. Lucky for me.

“Olive!” Bronwyn shouted. “Get away from there!” I looked up to see her yank Olive away from a clown who had bent down to talk to her. “I’ve told you time and again, never talk to normals!”

Our group was large enough that keeping it together could be a challenge, especially in a place like this, full of distractions tailor-made to fascinate children. Bronwyn acted as den mother, rounding us up every time one of us strayed to get a closer look at a stall of brightly colored pinwheels or steaming boiled candy. Olive was the most easily distractible, and often seemed to forget that we were in serious danger. It was only possible to keep so many kids in line because they were not actually kids — because there was some older nature inside them, warring against and balancing their childish impulses. With actual children, I’m sure it would’ve been hopeless.

For a while we wandered aimlessly, looking for anyone who resembled Miss Wren, or anywhere it seemed peculiars were likely to hide. But everything here seemed peculiar — this entire loop, with all its chaotic strangeness, was perfect camouflage for peculiars. And yet, even here, people noticed us, their heads turning subtly as we passed. I started to get paranoid. How many of the people around us were spies for the wights — or wights themselves? I was especially wary of the clown, the one Bronwyn had pulled Olive away from. He kept turning up. We must’ve passed him five times in as many minutes: loitering at the mouth of an alley, staring down from a window, watching us from a tented photo booth, his mussed hair and horrific makeup clashing bizarrely with a backdrop painting of bucolic countryside. He seemed to be everywhere at once.

“It’s not good being out in the open like this,” I said to Emma.

“We can’t just circle around forever. People are noticing us. Clowns.”

“Clowns?” she said. “Anyway, I agree with you — but it’s difficult to know where to start in all this madness.”

“We should start at what is always the most peculiar part of any carnival,” said Enoch, butting between us. “The sideshow.” He pointed at a tall, gaudy facade at the edge of the square. “Sideshows and peculiars go together like milk and cookies. Or hollows and wights.”

“Usually they do,” said Emma, “but the wights know that as well. I’m sure Miss Wren hasn’t kept her freedom this long by hiding in such obvious places.”

“Have you got a better idea?” said Enoch.

We didn’t, and so we shifted direction toward the sideshow. I looked back for the leering clown, but he had melted into the crowd.

At the sideshow, a scruffy carnival barker was shouting through a megaphone, promising glimpses of “the most shocking errors of nature allowed on view by law” for a trivial fee. It was called the Congress of Human Oddities.

“Sounds like dinner parties I’ve attended,” said Horace.

“Some of these ‘oddities’ might be peculiar,” said Millard, “in which case they might know something about Miss Wren. I say it’s worth the price of admission.”

“We don’t have the price of admission,” said Horace, pulling a single, lint-flecked coin from his pocket.

“Since when have we ever paid to get into a sideshow?” said Enoch.

We followed Enoch around to the back of the sideshow, where its wall-like facade gave way to a big, flimsy tent. We were scouting for openings to slip through when a flap pulled back and a well-dressed man and woman burst out, the man holding the lady, the lady fanning herself.

“Move aside!” the man barked. “This woman needs air!”

A sign above the flap read: PERFORMERS ONLY.

We slipped inside and were immediately stopped. A plain-looking boy sat on a tufted stool near the entrance, apparently in some official capacity. “You performers?” he said. “Can’t come in ’less you’re performers.”

Feigning offense, Emma said, “Of course we’re performers,” and to demonstrate, she made a tiny flame on the tip of her finger and stubbed it out in her eye.

The boy shrugged, unimpressed. “Go on, then.”

We shuffled past him, blinking, our eyes adjusting slowly to the dark. The sideshow was a low-ceilinged maze of canvas — a single, dramatically torchlit aisle that took sharp turns every twenty or thirty feet, so that around each corner we were confronted by a new “abomination of nature.” A trickle of spectators, some laughing, others pale and shaking, stumbled past us in the opposite direction.

The first few freaks were standard-issue sideshow fare, and not especially peculiar: an “illustrated” man covered in tattoos; a bearded lady stroking her long chin-whiskers and cackling; a human pincushion who pierced his face with needles and drove nails into his nostrils with a hammer. While I thought this was pretty impressive, my friends, some of whom had traveled Europe in a sideshow with Miss Peregrine, could hardly stifle their yawns.

Under a banner that read THE AMAZING MATCHSTICK MEN, a gentleman with hundreds of matchbooks glued to his suit body-slammed a man similarly clothed in matchsticks, causing flames to erupt across the matchstick man’s chest as he flailed in fake terror.

“Amateurs,” Emma muttered as she pulled us on to the next attraction.

The oddities got progressively odder. There was a girl in a long, fringed dress who wore a giant python around her body, which wriggled and danced at her command. Emma allowed that this was at least marginally peculiar, since the ability to enchant snakes was something only syndrigasti could do. But when Emma mentioned Miss Wren to the girl, she gave us a hard stare and her snake hissed and showed its fangs, and we moved on.

“This is a waste of time,” said Enoch. “Miss Peregrine’s clock is running out and we’re touring a carnival! Why not get some sweets and make a day of it?”

There was only one more freak to see, though, so we continued on. The final stage was empty but for a plain backdrop, a small table with flowers on it, and an easel-propped sign that read: THE WORLD-FAMOUS FOLDING MAN.

A stagehand walked onto the stage lugging a suitcase. He set the case down and left.

A crowd gathered. The suitcase sat there, center stage. People began to shout, “On with the show!” and “Bring out the freak!”

The suitcase jiggled. Then it began to shake, wobbling back and forth until it toppled onto its side. The crowd pressed toward the stage, fixated on the case.

Its latches popped, and very slowly, the case began to open. A pair of white eyes peeped out at the crowd, and then the case opened a little more to reveal a face — that of an adult man, with a neatly trimmed mustache and little round glasses, who had somehow folded himself into a suitcase no larger than my torso.

The crowd burst into applause, which increased as the freak proceeded to unfold himself, limb by limb, and step out of the impossibly small case. He was very tall and as skinny as a beanpole — so alarmingly thin, in fact, that it looked as if his bones were about to break through his skin. He was a human exclamation point, but carried himself with such dignity that I couldn’t laugh at him. He studied the hooting crowd dourly before taking a deep bow.

He then took a minute to demonstrate how his limbs could bend in all sorts of exotic ways — his knee twisting so that the top of his foot touched his hip, then his hips folding so that the knee touched his chest — and after more applause and more bows, the show was over.

We lingered as the crowd filtered away. The folding man was leaving the stage when Emma said to him, “You’re peculiar, aren’t you?”

The man stopped. He turned slowly to look at her with an air of imperious annoyance. “Excuse me?” he said in a thick Russian accent.

“Sorry to corner you this way, but we need to find Miss Wren,” Emma said. “We know she’s here someplace.”

“Peh!” said the man, dismissing her with a noise halfway between laughing and hawking spit.

“It’s an emergency!” Bronwyn pleaded.

The folding man crossed his arms in a bony X and said, “I dunno anything what you say,” then walked off the stage.

“Now what?” asked Bronwyn.

“We keep looking,” said Emma.

“And if we don’t find Miss Wren?” said Enoch.

“We keep looking,” Emma said through her teeth. “Everyone understand?”

Everyone understood perfectly well. We were out of options. If this didn’t work — if Miss Wren wasn’t here or we couldn’t find her soon — then all our efforts would have been for nothing, and Miss Peregrine would be lost just the same as if we’d never come to London at all.

We walked out of the sideshow the way we’d come, dejected, past the now-empty stages, past the plain-looking boy, out of the tent and into the daylight. We were standing outside the exit, unsure what to do next, when the plain-looking boy leaned out through the flap. “Wotsa trouble?” he said. “Show weren’t to your liking?”

“It was … fine,” I said, waving him off.

“Not peculiar enough for you?” he asked.

That got our attention. “What’d you say?” said Emma.

“Wakeling and Rookery,” he said, pointing past us toward the far side of the square. “That’s where the real show is.” And then he winked at us and ducked back inside the tent.

“That was mysterious,” said Hugh.

“Did he say peculiar?” said Bronwyn.

“What’s Wakeling and Rookery?” I said.

“A place,” said Horace. “Someplace in this loop, maybe.”

“Could be the intersection of two streets,” said Emma, and she pulled back the tent flap to ask the boy if this was what he meant — but he was already gone.

So we set off through the crowd, toward the far end of the square where he’d pointed, our one last, thin hope pinned to a couple of oddly named streets we weren’t even sure existed.

There was a point, a few blocks beyond the square, where the noise of the crowd faded and was replaced by an industrial clank and clamor, and the rich funk of roasting meat and animal waste was replaced by a stench far worse and unnameable. Crossing a walled river of Stygian sludge, we entered a district of factories and workhouses, of smokestacks belching black stuff into the sky, and this is where we found Wakeling Street. We walked one way down Wakeling looking for Rookery until it dead-ended at a large open sewer which Enoch said was the River Fleet, then turned and came back the other way. When we’d passed the point along Wakeling where we’d started, the street began to curve and twist, the factories and workhouses shrinking down into squat offices and unassuming buildings with blank faces and no signs, like a neighborhood purpose-built to be anonymous.

The bad feeling I’d been nursing got worse. What if we’d been set up — sent to this deserted part of the city to be ambushed out of view?

The street twisted and straightened again, and then I crashed into Emma, who’d been walking in front of me but had come to a sudden stop.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

In lieu of an answer, she just pointed. Up ahead, at a T-shaped intersection, there was a crowd. Though it had been sticky-hot back at the carnival, many of them were bundled in coats and scarves. They were assembled around a particular building, and stood gazing up at it in dumbfounded wonder — just as we were, now. The building itself was nothing special — four stories, the top three just rows of narrow, rounded windows, like an old office building. It was, in fact, nearly identical to all the buildings around it, with one exception: it was totally encased in ice. Ice coated its windows and doors. Icicles hung like fangs from every sill and ledge. Snow spilled from its doorways, collecting in giant heaps on the sidewalk. It looked like a blizzard had struck the building — from the inside.

I peered at a snow-blasted street sign: R — KERY STRE — .

“I know this place,” said Melina. “It’s the peculiar archives, where all our official records are kept.”

“How do you know that?” said Emma.

“Miss Thrush was grooming me to be second assistant to the ombudswoman there. The examination’s very difficult. I’ve been studying for twenty-one years.”

“Is it supposed to be covered in ice like that?” asked Bronwyn.

“Not that I’m aware,” said Melina.

“It’s also where the Council of Ymbrynes convene for the annual Nitpicking of the Bylaws,” said Millard.

“The Council of Ymbrynes meets here?” said Horace. “It’s awfully humble. I expected a castle or somesuch.”

“It’s not meant to stand out,” said Melina. “You aren’t supposed to notice it at all.”

“They’re doing a poor job of keeping it hidden, then,” said Enoch.

“As I said, it’s not usually covered in ice.”

“What do you think happened here?” I asked.

“Nothing good,” said Millard. “Nothing good at all.”

There was no question we’d have to get closer and explore, but that didn’t mean we had to rush in like fools. We hung back and watched from a distance. People came and went. Someone tried the door but it was frozen shut. The crowd thinned a bit.

“Tick, tick, tick,” said Enoch. “We’re wasting time.”

We cut through what was left of the crowd and stepped onto the icy sidewalk. The building emanated cold, and we shivered and jammed our hands into our pockets against it. Bronwyn used her strength to pull open the door, and it came straight off, hinges flying — but the hallway it let onto was completely obstructed by ice. It stretched from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and into the building in a blue and cloudy blur. The same was true of the windows: I wiped the frost from one pane and then another, and through both I could see only ice. It was as if a glacier was being born somewhere in the heart of the place, and its frozen tongues were squeezing out wherever there was an opening.

We tried every way we could think of to get inside. We rounded the building looking for a door or window that wasn’t blocked, but every potential entrance was filled with ice. We picked up stones and loose bricks and tried hacking at the ice, but it was almost super-naturally hard — even Bronwyn could dig no more than a few inches into it. Millard scanned the Tales for any mention of the building, but there was nothing, no secrets to be found.

Finally, we decided to take a calculated risk. We formed a semicircle around Emma to block her from view, and she heated her hands and placed them against the ice wall that filled the hallway. After a minute they began to sink into the ice, meltwater trickling down to puddle around our feet. But the progress was painfully slow, and after five minutes she’d only gotten up to her elbows.

“At this rate, it’ll take the rest of the week just to get down the hall,” she said, pulling her arms from the ice.

“Do you think Miss Wren could really be inside?” said Bronwyn.

“She has to be,” Emma said firmly.

“I find this contagion of optimism positively flabbergasting,” said Enoch. “If Miss Wren is in there, then she’s frozen solid.”

Emma erupted at him. “Doom and gloom! Ruin and ruination! I think you’d be happy if the world came to an end tomorrow, just so you could say I told you so!”

Enoch blinked at her, surprised, then said very calmly, “You may choose to live in a world of fantasy if you like, my dear, but I am a realist.”

“If you ever offered more than simple criticism,” Emma said, “if you ever gave a single useful suggestion during a crisis, rather than just shrugging your shoulders at the prospect of failure and death, I might be able to tolerate your unrelenting black moods! But as it stands — ”

“We’ve tried everything!” Enoch interjected. “What could I possibly suggest?”

“There’s one thing we haven’t tried,” Olive said, piping up from the edge of our group.

“And what’s that?” asked Emma.

Olive decided to show rather than tell us. Leaving the sidewalk, she went into the crowd, turned to face the building, and called at the top of her lungs, “Hello, Miss Wren! If you’re in there, please come out! We need your — ”

Before she could finish, Bronwyn had tackled her, and the rest of Olive’s sentence was delivered into the big girl’s armpit. “Are you insane?” Bronwyn said, bringing Olive back to us under her arm.

“You’re going to get us all found out!”

She set Olive on the sidewalk and was about to chastise her further when tears began streaming down the little girl’s face. “What does it matter if we’re found out?” Olive said. “If we can’t find Miss Wren and we can’t save Miss Peregrine, what does it matter if the whole wight army descends on us right now?”

A lady stepped out of the crowd and approached us. She was older, back bent with age, her face partly obscured by the hood of a cloak. “Is she all right?” the lady asked.

“She’s fine, thank you,” Emma said dismissively.

“I’m not!” said Olive. “Nothing is right! All we ever wanted was to live in peace on our island, and then bad things came and hurt our headmistress. Now all we want to do is help her — and we can’t even do that!”

Olive hung her head and began to weep pitifully.

“Well then,” said the woman, “it’s an awfully good thing you came to see me.”

Olive looked up, sniffled, and said, “Why is that?”

And then the woman vanished.

Just like that.

She disappeared right out of her clothes, and her cloak, suddenly empty, collapsed onto the pavement with an airy whump. We were all too stunned to speak — until a small bird came hopping out from beneath the folds of the cloak.

I froze, not sure if I should try to catch it.

“Does anyone know what sort of bird that is?” asked Horace.

“I believe that’s a wren,” said Millard.

The bird flapped its wings, leapt into the air, and flew away, disappearing around the side of the building.

“Don’t lose her!” Emma shouted, and we all took off running after it, slipping and sliding on the ice, rounding the corner into the snow-choked alley that ran between the glaciated building and the one next to it.

The bird was gone.

“Drat!” Emma said. “Where’d she go?”

Then a series of odd sounds came up from the ground beneath our feet: metallic clanks, voices, and a noise like water flushing. We kicked the snow away to find a pair of wooden doors set into the bricks, like the entrance to a coal cellar.

The doors were unlatched. We pulled them open. Inside were steps that led down into the dark, covered in quick-melting ice, the meltwater draining loudly into an unseen gutter.

Emma crouched and called into the darkness. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“If you’re coming,” returned a distant voice, “come quickly!”

Emma stood up, surprised. Then shouted: “Who are you?”

We waited for an answer. None came.

“What are we waiting for?” said Olive. “It’s Miss Wren!”

“We don’t know that,” said Millard. “We don’t know what happened here.”

“Well, I’m going to find out,” Olive said, and before anyone could stop her she’d gone to the cellar doors and leapt through them, floating gently to the bottom. “I’m still alive!” her voice taunted us from the dark.

And so we were shamed into following her, and climbed down the steps to find a passage tunneled through thick ice. Freezing water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the walls in a steady stream. And it wasn’t completely dark, after all — gauzy light glowed from around a turn in the passage ahead.

We heard footsteps approaching. A shadow climbed the wall in front of us. Then a cloaked figure appeared at the turn in the passage, silhouetted in the light.

“Hello, children,” the figure said. “I am Balenciaga Wren, and I’m so pleased you’re here.”

CHAPTER XII

I am Balenciaga Wren.

Hearing those words was like uncorking a bottle under pressure. First came the initial release — gasps, giddy laughter — and then an outpouring of joy: Emma and I jumped and hugged each other; Horace fell to his knees and tossed up his arms in a wordless hallelujah! Olive was so excited that she lifted into the air even with her weighted shoes on, stuttering, “We-we-we — we thought we might never — never see another ymbryne ever-ever again!”

This, finally, was Miss Wren. Days ago she’d been nothing more to us than the obscure ymbryne of a little-known loop, but since then she’d achieved mythic stature: she was, as far as we knew, the last free and whole-bodied ymbryne, a living symbol of hope, something we’d all been starving for. And here she was, right in front of us, so human and frail. I recognized her from Addison’s photo, only now there was no trace of black left in her silver hair. Deep-set worry lines stacked her brow and held her mouth in parentheses, and her shoulders were hunched as if she were not merely old, but straining under some monumental burden; the weight of all our desperate hope piling down on her.

The ymbryne pulled back the hood of her cloak and said, “I am very glad to meet you, too, dears, but you must come inside at once; it isn’t safe out here.”

She turned and hobbled away into the passage. We fell into line, waddling behind her through the tunneled ice like a train of ducklings after their mother, feet shuffling and arms held out in awkward balance poses to keep from slipping. Such was the power of an ymbryne over peculiar children: the very presence of one — even one we’d only just met — had an immediate pacifying effect on us.

The floor ramped upward, leading us past silent furnaces bearded with frost, into a large room clogged floor to ceiling and wall to wall with ice except for the tunnel we were in, which had been carved straight through the middle. The ice was thick but clear, and in some places I could see twenty or thirty feet into it with only a slight waver of distortion. The room appeared to be a reception area, with rows of straight-backed chairs facing a massive desk and some filing cabinets, all trapped inside tons of ice. Blue-filtered daylight shone from a row of unreachable windows, beyond which was the street, a smear of indistinct gray.

A hundred hollows could spend a week hacking at that ice and not reach us. If not for the tunnel entrance, this place would make a perfect fortress. Either that or a perfect prison.

On the walls hung dozens of clocks, their stilled hands pointed every which way. (To keep track of the time in different loops, maybe?) Above them, directional signs pointed the way to certain offices:

← UNDERSECRETARY OF TEMPORAL AFFAIRS

← CONSERVATOR OF GRAPHICAL RECORDS

NONSPECIFIC MATTERS OF URGENCY →

DEPT. OF OBFUSCATION AND DEFERMENT →

Through the door to the Temporal Affairs office, I saw a man trapped in the ice. He was frozen in a stooped posture, as if he’d been trying to dislodge his feet as ice overtook the rest of him. He’d been there a long time. I shuddered and looked away.

The tunnel came to an end at a fancy, balustraded staircase that was free of ice but awash in loose papers. A girl stood on one of the lower steps, and she watched our halting, slip-sliding approach without enthusiasm. She had long hair that was parted severely down the middle and fell all the way to her hips, small, round glasses she was constantly adjusting, and thin lips that looked like they’d never once curled into a smile.

“Althea!” Miss Wren said sharply. “You mustn’t wander off like that while the passage is open — anything at all might wander in here!”

“Yes, mistress,” the girl said, then cocked her head slightly.

“Who are they, mistress?”

“These are Miss Peregrine’s wards. The ones I was telling you about.”

“Have they brought any food with them? Or medicine? Or anything useful at all?” The girl spoke with excruciating slowness, her voice as wooden as her expression.

“No more questions until you’ve closed up,” Miss Wren said. “Quick now!”

“Yes, mistress,” the girl said, and with no apparent sense of urgency she ambled away down the tunnel, dragging her hands along the walls as she went.

“Apologies for that,” said Miss Wren. “Althea doesn’t mean to be obstinate; she’s just naturally mulish. But she keeps the wolves at bay, and we badly need her. We’ll wait here until she returns.”

Miss Wren sat on the bottom step, and as she lowered herself I could almost hear her old bones creaking. I didn’t know what she meant by keeps the wolves at bay, but there were too many other questions to be asked, so that one would have to wait.

“Miss Wren, how did you know who we are?” asked Emma. “We never said.”

“It’s an ymbryne’s business to know,” she replied. “I have watchers in the trees from here to the Irish Sea. And besides, you’re famous! There’s only one ymbryne whose wards were able to slip the corrupted’s grasp complete and entire, and that’s Miss Peregrine. But I’ve no idea how you made it this far without being captured — or how in peculiardom you found me!”

“A boy at the carnival directed us here,” said Enoch. He raised a hand level with his chin. “About yea big? Wearing a silly hat?”

“One of our lookouts,” said Miss Wren, nodding. “But how did you find him?”

“We caught one of your spy pigeons,” Emma said proudly, “and she led us to this loop.” (She left out the part about Miss Peregrine having killed it.)

“My pigeons!” Miss Wren exclaimed. “But how did you know about them? Much less catch one?”

Then Millard stepped forward. He had borrowed Horace’s disguising-room overcoat to keep from freezing, and though Miss Wren didn’t seem surprised to see a coat hovering in the air, she was astonished when the invisible boy wearing it said, “I deduced your birds’ location from the Tales of the Peculiar, but we first heard of them in your mountaintop menagerie, from a pretentious dog.”

“But no one knows the location of my menagerie!”

Miss Wren was now almost too astonished to speak, and since every answer we gave her only sparked more questions, we laid out our whole story for her, as quickly as we could, stretching all the way back to our escape from the island in those tiny, open boats.

“We nearly drowned!” said Olive.

“And got shot, and bombed, and eaten by hollows,” said Bronwyn.

“And run over by an underground train,” said Enoch.

“And squashed by a dresser,” said Horace, scowling at the telekinetic girl.

“We’ve traveled a long way across dangerous country,” Emma said, “all to find someone who could help Miss Peregrine. We were quite hoping that person would be you, Miss Wren.”

“Counting on it, really,” said Millard.

It took Miss Wren a few moments to find her voice, and when she did, it was gravelly with emotion. “You brave, wonderful children. You’re miracles, every one of you, and any ymbryne would be lucky to call you her wards.” She dabbed at a tear with the sleeve of her cloak. “I was so sorry to hear about what happened to your Miss Peregrine. I didn’t know her well, as I’m a retiring sort of person, but I promise you this: we’ll get her back. She and all our sisters!”

Get her back?

That’s when I realized Miss Peregrine was still hidden in the sack that Horace was carrying. Miss Wren hadn’t seen her yet!

Horace said, “Why, she’s right here!” and he put the sack down and untied it.

A moment later, Miss Peregrine came tottering out, dizzy after spending so long in the dark.

“By the Elderfolk!” Miss Wren exclaimed. “But … I heard she’d been taken by the wights!”

“She was taken,” Emma said, “and then we took her back!”

Miss Wren was so excited that she leapt up without her cane, and I had to steady her elbow to keep her from toppling over. “Alma, is that really you?” Miss Wren said breathlessly, and when she had her balance again she rushed over to scoop up Miss Peregrine. “Hullo, Alma? Is that you in there?”

“It’s her!” Emma said. “That’s Miss Peregrine!”

Miss Wren held the bird at arm’s length, turning her this way and that while Miss Peregrine squirmed. “Hum, hum, hum,” Miss Wren said under her breath, her eyes narrowing and lips drawing tight. “Something’s not right with your headmistress.”

“She got hurt,” said Olive. “Hurt on the inside.”

“She can’t turn human anymore,” said Emma.

Miss Wren nodded grimly, as if she’d already figured this out.

“How long’s it been?”

“Three days,” said Emma. “Ever since we stole her back from the wights.”

I said, “Your dog told us that if Miss Peregrine didn’t change back soon, she’d never be able to.”

“Yes,” Miss Wren said. “Addison was quite right about that.”

“He also said that the sort of help she needed was something only another ymbryne could give her,” said Emma.

“That’s right, too.”

“She’s changed,” said Bronwyn. “She isn’t herself anymore. We need the old Miss P back!”

“We can’t let this happen to her!” said Horace.

“So?” said Olive. “Can you turn her human now, please?”

We had surrounded Miss Wren and were pressing in on her, our desperation palpable.

Miss Wren put up her hands in a plea for quiet. “I wish it were that simple,” she said, “or so immediate. When an ymbryne remains a bird for too long, she becomes rigid, like a cold muscle. If you try and bend her back to shape too quickly, she’ll snap. She’s got to be massaged into her true form, delicately; worked and worked like clay. If I work with her through the night, I might have it done by morning.”

“If she has that long,” said Emma.

“Pray that she does,” said Miss Wren.

The long-haired girl returned, walking slowly toward us, dragging her hands along the tunnel walls. Everywhere they touched, layer upon layer of new ice formed. The tunnel behind her had already narrowed to just a few feet wide; soon it would be closed completely, and we’d be sealed in.

Miss Wren waved the girl over. “Althea! Run upstairs ahead of us and have the nurse prepare an examination room. I shall need all my medicinal remedies!”

“When you say remedies, do you mean your solutions, your infusions, or your suspensions?”

“All of them!” Miss Wren shouted. “And quickly — this is an emergency!”

Then I saw the girl notice Miss Peregrine, and her eyes widened a bit — the most I’d seen her react to anything — and she started up the stairs.

This time, she was running.

I held Miss Wren’s arm, steadying her as we climbed the stairs. The building had four stories, and we were heading for the top. Aside from the stairwell, that was the only part of the building still accessible; the other floors were all frozen shut, walls of ice clogging their rooms and hallways. We were, in effect, climbing through the hollowed center of a gigantic ice cube.

I glanced into some of the frozen rooms as we hurried past them. Bulging tongues of ice had broken doors off their hinges, and through their splintered jambs I could see evidence of a raid: kicked-over furniture, drawers torn open, snows of paper on the floor. A machine gun leaned against a desk, its owner frozen in flight. A peculiar slumped in a corner beneath a slash of bullet holes. Like the victims of Pompeii, arrested in ice rather than ash.

It was hard to believe one girl could have been responsible for all this. Apart from ymbrynes, Althea had to be one of the most powerful peculiars I’d ever met. I looked up in time to see her disappear around the landing above us, that endless mane of hair trailing behind her like a blurred afterimage.

I snapped an icicle off the wall. “She really did all this?” I said, turning it in my hand.

“She did indeed,” said Miss Wren, puffing beside me. “She is — or was, I should say — apprenticed to the minister of obfuscation and deferment, and was here performing her duties on the day the corrupted raided the building. At the time she knew little of her power other than that her hands radiated unnatural cold. To hear Althea tell it, her ability was the sort of thing that came in useful during hot summer days, but which she’d never thought of as a defense weapon until two hollows began devouring the minister before her very eyes. In mortal fear, she called upon a well of power previously unknown to her, froze the room — and the hollows — and then the entire building, all in the space of a few minutes.”

“Minutes!” Emma said. “I don’t believe it.”

“I rather wish I’d been here to witness it,” said Miss Wren, “though if I had, I likely would’ve been kidnapped along with the other ymbrynes who were present at the time — Miss Nightjar, Miss Finch, and Miss Crow.”

“Her ice didn’t stop the wights?” I asked.

“It stopped many of them,” said Miss Wren. “Several are still with us, I imagine, frozen in the building’s recesses. But despite their losses, the wights ultimately got what they came for. Before the entire building froze, they managed to secrete the ymbrynes out through the roof.” Miss Wren shook her head bitterly. “I swear on my life, one day I’ll personally escort all those that hurt my sisters to Hell.”

“All that power she has didn’t do any good at all, then,” said Enoch.

“Althea wasn’t able to save the ymbrynes,” Miss Wren said, “but she made this place, and that’s blessing enough. Without it we’d have no refuge anywhere. I’ve been using it as our base of operations for the past few days, bringing back survivors from raided loops as I come across them. This is our fortress, the only safe place for peculiars in all of London.”

“And what of your efforts, madam?” said Millard. “The dog said you came here to help your sisters. Have you had any luck?”

“No,” she said quietly. “My efforts have not been successful.”

“Maybe Jacob can help you, Miss Wren,” Olive said. “He’s very special.”

Miss Wren looked sideways at me. “Is that so? And what is your talent, young man?”

“I can see hollows,” I said, a little embarrassed. “And sense them.”

“And kill them, sometimes,” added Bronwyn. “If we hadn’t found you, Miss Wren, Jacob was going to help us slip past the hollows that guard the punishment loops, so that we could rescue one of the ymbrynes being held there. In fact, maybe he could help you …”

“That’s kind of you,” said Miss Wren, “but my sisters are not being held in the punishment loops, or anywhere near London, I’m sure.”

“They aren’t?” I said.

“No, and they never were. That business about the punishment loops was a ruse concocted to ensnare those ymbrynes whom the corrupted weren’t able to capture in their raids. Namely, myself. And it nearly worked. Like a fool, I flew right into their trap — the punishment loops are prisons, after all! I’m lucky to have escaped with only a few scars to show for it.”

“Then where were the kidnapped ymbrynes taken?” asked Emma.

“I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew, because it’s none of your concern,” Miss Wren said. “It isn’t the duty of peculiar children to worry for the welfare of ymbrynes — it’s ours to worry for yours.”

“But, Miss Wren, that’s hardly fair,” Millard began, but she cut him short with a curt “I won’t hear anything else about it!” and that was that.

I was shocked by this sudden dismissal, especially considering that if we hadn’t worried about Miss Peregrine’s welfare — and risked our lives to bring her here! — she would’ve been condemned to spend the rest of her days trapped in the body of a bird. So it did seem like our duty to worry, since the ymbrynes had clearly not done a good enough job worrying to keep their loops from being raided. I didn’t like being talked down to that way, and judging from Emma’s knitted brow, she didn’t, either — but to have said so would’ve been unthinkably rude, so we finished our climb in awkward silence.

We came to the top of the stairs. Only a few of the doorways on this level were iced over. Miss Wren took Miss Peregrine from Horace and said, “Come on, Alma, let’s see what can be done for you.”

Althea appeared in an open door, her face flushed, chest heaving. “Your room’s all ready, mistress. Everything you asked for.”

“Good, good,” said Miss Wren.

“If we can do anything to help you,” Bronwyn said, “anything at all …”

“All I need is time and quiet,” Miss Wren replied. “I’ll save your ymbryne, young ones. On my life I will.” And she turned and took Miss Peregrine into the room with Althea.

Not knowing what else to do with ourselves, we drifted after her and congregated around the door, which had been left open a crack. We took turns peeking inside. In a cozy room dimly lit by oil lamps, Miss Wren sat in a rocking chair holding Miss Peregrine in her lap. Althea stood mixing vials of liquid at a lab table. Every so often she’d lift a vial and swirl it, then walk to Miss Peregrine and pass it under her beak — much the way smelling salts are waved under the nose of someone who’s fainted. All the while, Miss Wren rocked in the chair and stroked Miss Peregrine’s feathers, singing her a soft, lilting lullaby:

“Eft kaa vangan soorken, eft ka vangan soorken, malaaya …”

“That’s the tongue of the old peculiars,” Millard whispered.

“Come home, come home … remember your true self … something like that.”

Miss Wren heard him and looked up, then waved us away. Althea crossed the room and shut the door.

“Well, then,” said Enoch. “I can see we’re not wanted here.”

After three days of the headmistress depending on us for everything, we had suddenly become extraneous. Though we were grateful to Miss Wren, she’d made us all feel a bit like children who’d been ordered to bed.

“Miss Wren knows her business,” came a Russian-accented voice from behind us. “Best leave her to it.”

We turned to see the stick-thin folding man from the carnival, standing with his bony arms crossed.

“You!” said Emma.

“We meet again,” the folding man said, his voice deep as an ocean trench. “My name is Sergei Andropov, and I am captain of peculiar resistance army. Come, I will show you around.”

“I knew he was peculiar!” Olive said.

“No, you didn’t,” said Enoch. “You only thought he was.”

“I knew you were peculiar the second I saw you,” said the folding man. “How you weren’t captured long time ago?”

“Because we’re wily,” said Hugh.

“He means lucky,” I said.

“But mostly just hungry,” said Enoch. “Got any food around here? I could eat an emu-raffe.”

At the mere mention of food, my stomach growled like a wild animal. None of us had eaten since our train ride to London, which seemed eons ago.

“Of course,” said the folding man. “This way.”

We followed him down the hall.

“So tell me about this peculiar army of yours,” Emma said.

“We will crush the wights and take back what’s ours. Punish them for kidnapping our ymbrynes.” He opened a door off the hallway and led us through a wrecked office where people lay sleeping on the floor and under desks. As we stepped around them, I recognized a few of their faces from the carnival: the plain-looking boy, the frizzy-haired snake-charmer girl.

“They’re all peculiar?” I asked.

The folding man nodded. “Rescued from other loops,” he said, holding a door open for us.

“And you?” said Millard. “Where did you come from?”

The folding man led us into a vestibule where we could talk without disturbing the sleepers, a room dominated by two large wooden doors emblazoned with dozens of bird insignias. “I come from land of frozen desert beyond Icy Waste,” he said. “Hundred years ago, when hollows first born, they strike my home first. Everything destroy. All in village killed. Old woman. Baby. All.” He made a chopping motion in the air with his hand. “I hide in butter churn, breathe through reed of straw, while own brother killed in same house. After, I come to London to escape the hollows. But they come, too.”

“That’s awful,” said Bronwyn. “I’m so sorry for you.”

“One day we take revenge,” he said, his face darkening.

“You mentioned that,” said Enoch. “How many are in your army, then?”

“Right now six,” he said, gesturing to the room we’d just left.

“Six people?!” said Emma. “You mean … them?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“With you, makes seventeen. We growing quick.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “We didn’t come here to join any army.”

He gave me a look that could freeze Hell, then turned and threw open the double doors.

We followed him into a large room dominated by a massive oval table, its wood polished to a mirror shine. “This is Ymbryne Council meeting place,” the folding man said.

All around us were portraits of famous old peculiars, not framed but drawn directly onto the walls in oil and charcoal and grease pencil. The one closest to me was a face with wide, staring eyes and an open mouth, inside of which was a real, functioning water fountain. Around its mouth was a motto written in Dutch, which Millard, standing next to me, translated: “From the mouths of our elders comes a fountain of wisdom.”

Nearby was another, this one in Latin. “Ardet nec consomitur,” Melina said. “Burned but not destroyed.”

“How fitting,” said Enoch.

“I can’t believe I’m really here,” said Melina. “I’ve studied this place and dreamed about it for so many years.”

“It’s just a room,” said Enoch.

“Maybe to you. To me, it’s the heart of the whole peculiar world.”

“A heart that’s been ripped out,” said someone new, and I looked to see a clown striding toward us — the same one who’d been stalking us at the carnival. “Miss Jackdaw was standing right where you are when she was taken. We found a whole pile of her feathers on the floor.” His accent was American. He stopped a few feet from us and stood, chewing, one hand on his hip. “This them?” he asked the folding man, pointing at us with a turkey leg. “We need soldiers, not little kids.”

“I’m a hundred and twelve!” said Melina.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before,” said the clown. “I could tell you people were peculiar from across the fairgrounds, by the way. You’re the most obviously peculiar bunch of peculiars I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“I told them same thing,” said the folding man.

“How they made it all the way here from Wales without being captured is beyond me,” said the clown. “In fact, it’s suspicious. Sure one of you ain’t a wight?”

“How dare you!” said Emma.

“We were captured,” Hugh said proudly, “but the wights who took us didn’t live to tell about it.”

“Uh-huh, and I’m the king of Bolivia,” the clown said.

“It’s true!” Hugh thundered, going red in the face.

The clown tossed up his hands. “Okay, okay, calm down, kid! I’m sure Wren wouldn’t have let you in if you weren’t legitimate. Come on, let’s be friends, have a turkey leg.”

He didn’t have to offer twice. We were too hungry to stay offended for long.

The clown showed us to a table stacked with food — the same boiled nuts and roasted meats that had tempted us at the carnival. We crowded around the table and stuffed our faces shamelessly. The folding man ate five cherries and a small hunk of bread and then announced he’d never been so full in his life. Bronwyn paced along the wall, chewing her fingers, too consumed by worry to eat.

When we were done, and the table was a battlefield of gnawed bones and grease stains, the clown leaned back in his chair and said, “So, peculiar children, what’s your story? Why’d you come here all the way from Wales?”

Emma wiped her mouth and said, “To help our ymbryne.”

“And when she’s helped?” the clown asked. “What then?”

I’d been busy sopping up turkey gravy with the last of the bread, but now I looked up. The question was so straightforward, so simply put — so obvious — that I couldn’t believe none of us had asked it before.

“Don’t talk like that,” said Horace. “You’ll jinx us.”

“Wren’s a miracle worker,” the clown said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Emma.

“Of course I am. So what’s your plan? You’ll stay and help us fight, obviously, but where will you sleep? Not with me, my room’s a single. Exceptions rarely made.” He looked at Emma and raised an eyebrow. “Note I said rarely.”

All of a sudden everyone was looking off at the paintings on the walls or adjusting their collars — except for Emma, whose face was turning a certain shade of green. Maybe we were naturally pessimistic, and our chances of success had seemed so tiny that we’d never bothered to wonder what we’d do if we actually fixed Miss Peregrine — or maybe the crises of the past few days had been so constant and pressing that we’d never had a chance to wonder. Either way, the clown’s question had caught us off guard.

What if we really pulled this off? What would we do if Miss Peregrine walked into the room, right now, restored to her old self?

It was Millard who finally gave an answer. “I suppose we would head west again, back where we come from. Miss Peregrine could make another loop for us. One where we’d never be found.”

“That’s it?” the clown said. “You’ll hide? What about all the other ymbrynes — the ones who weren’t so lucky? What about mine?”

“It isn’t our job to save the whole world,” Horace said.

“We’re not trying to save the whole world. Just all of peculiardom.”

“Well, that’s not our job, either.” Horace sounded weak and defensive, ashamed to have been cornered into saying this.

The clown leaned forward in his chair and glared at us. “Then whose job is it?”

“There’s got to be someone else,” said Enoch. “People who are better equipped, who’ve trained for this sort of thing …”

“The first thing the corrupted did three weeks ago was attack the Peculiar Home Guard. In less than a day, they were scattered to the four winds. With them gone, and now our ymbrynes, who does the defense of peculiardom fall to, eh? People like you and me, that’s who.” The clown threw down his turkey leg. “You cowards disgust me. I just lost my appetite.”

“They are tired, had long journey,” said the folding man. “Give them break.”

The clown waved his finger in the air like a schoolmarm. “Uh-uh. Nobody rides for free. I don’t care if you’re here for an hour or a month, as long as you’re here, you’ve got to be willing to fight. Now, you’re a scrawny-looking bunch, but you’re peculiar, so I know you’ve all got hidden talents. Show me what you can do!”

He got up and moved toward Enoch, one arm extended like he was going to search Enoch’s pockets for his peculiar ability. “You there,” he said. “Do your thing!”

“I’ll need a dead person in order to demonstrate,” Enoch said.

“That could be you, if you so much as lay one finger on me.”

The clown rerouted himself toward Emma. “Then how about you, sweetheart,” he said, and Emma held a particular finger up and made a flame dance atop it like a birthday candle. The clown laughed and said, “Sense of humor! I like that,” and moved on to the blind brothers.

“They’re connected in the head,” said Melina, putting herself between the clown and the brothers. “They can see with their ears, and always know what the other’s thinking.”

The clown clapped his hands. “Finally, something useful! They’ll be our lookouts — put one in the carnival and keep the other here. If anything goes wrong out there, we’ll know right away!”

He pushed past Melina. The brothers shied away from him.

“You can’t separate them!” said Melina. “Joel-and-Peter don’t like being apart.”

“And I don’t like being hunted by invisible corpse beasts,” said the clown, and he began to pry the older brother from the younger. The boys locked arms and moaned loudly, their tongues clicking and eyes rolling wildly in their heads. I was about to intervene when the brothers came apart and let out a doubled scream so loud and piercing I feared my head would break. The dishes on the table shattered, everyone ducked and clapped their hands over their ears, and I thought I could hear, from the frozen floors below, cracks spidering through the ice.

As the echo faded, Joel-and-Peter clutched each other on the floor, shaking.

“See what you did!” Melina shouted at the clown.

“Good God, that’s impressive!” the clown said.

With one hand Bronwyn picked the clown up by his neck.

“If you continue to harass us,” she said calmly, “I’ll put your head through the wall.”

“Sorry … about … that,” the clown wheezed through his closing windpipe. “Put … me … down?”

“Go on, Wyn,” said Olive. “He said he’s sorry.”

Reluctantly, Bronwyn set him down. The clown coughed and straightened his costume. “Looks like I misjudged you,” he said.

“You’ll make fine additions to our army.”

“I told you, we’re not joining your stupid army,” I said.

“What’s the point of fighting, anyway?” Emma said. “You don’t even know where the ymbrynes are.”

The folding man unfolded from his chair to tower above us.

“Point is,” he said, “if corrupted get rest of ymbrynes, they become unstoppable.”

“It seems like they’re pretty unstoppable already,” I said.

“If you think that’s unstoppable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said the clown. “And if you think that while your ymbryne is free they’ll ever stop hunting you, you’re stupider than you look.”

Horace stood up and cleared his throat. “You’ve just laid out the worst-case scenario,” he said. “Of late, I’ve heard a great many worst-case scenarios presented. But I haven’t heard a single argument laid for the best-case scenario.”

“Oh, this should be rich,” said the clown. “Go ahead, fancy boy, let’s hear it.”

Horace took a deep breath, working up his courage. “The wights wanted the ymbrynes, and now they have them — or most of them, anyway. Say, for the sake of argument, that’s all the wights need, and now they can follow through with their devilish plans. And they do: they become superwights, or demigods, or whatever it is they’re after. And then they have no more use for ymbrynes, and no more use for peculiar children, and no more use for time loops, so they go away to be demigods elsewhere and leave us alone. And then things not only go back to normal, they’re better than they were before, because no longer is anyone attempting to eat us or kidnap our ymbrynes. And then maybe, once in a great while, we could take a vacation abroad, like we used to, and see the world a bit, and put our toes in the sand somewhere that isn’t cold and gray three hundred days of the year. In which case, what’s the use in staying here and fighting? We’d be throwing ourselves onto their swords when everything might turn out just rosy without our intervention.”

For a moment no one said anything. Then the clown began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, his cackles bouncing off the walls, until finally he fell out of his chair.

Then Enoch said, “I simply have no words. Wait — no — I do! Horace, that is the most stunningly naive and cowardly bit of wishful thinking that I’ve ever heard.”

“But it is possible,” Horace insisted.

“Yes. It’s also possible that the moon is made of cheese. It’s just not bloody likely.”

“I can end argument right now,” said the folding man. “You want to know what wights will do with us once free to do anything? Come — I show you.”

“Strong stomachs only,” said the clown, glancing at Olive.

“If they can handle it, I can, too,” she said.

“Fair warning,” the clown shrugged. “Follow us.”

“I wouldn’t follow you off a sinking ship,” said Melina, who was just getting the shaking blind brothers to their feet again.

“Stay, then,” said the clown. “Anyone who’d rather not go down with the ship, follow us.”

The injured lay in mismatched beds in a makeshift hospital room, watched over by a nurse with a bulging glass eye. There were three patients, if you could call them that — a man and two women. The man lay on his side, half catatonic, whispering and drooling. One of the women stared blankly at the ceiling, while the other writhed under her sheets, moaning softly, in the grip of some nightmare. Some of the children watched from outside the door, keeping their distance in case whatever these people suffered from was contagious.

“How are they today?” the folding man asked the nurse.

“Getting worse,” she replied, buzzing from bed to bed. “I keep them sedated all the time now. Otherwise they just bawl.”

They had no obvious wounds. There were no bloody bandages, no limbs wrapped in casts, no bowls brimming with reddish liquid. The room looked more like overflow from a psychiatric ward than a hospital.

“What’s the matter with them?” I asked. “They were hurt in the raid?”

“No, brought here by Miss Wren,” answered the nurse. “She found them abandoned inside a hospital, which the wights had converted into some sort of medical laboratory. These pitiful creatures were used as guinea pigs in their unspeakable experiments. What you see is the result.”

“We found their old records,” the clown said. “They were kidnapped years ago by the wights. Long assumed dead.”

The nurse took a clipboard from the wall by the whispering man’s bed. “This fellow, Benteret, he’s supposed to be fluent in a hundred languages, but now he’ll only say one word — over and over again.”

I crept closer, watching his lips. Call, call, call, he was mouthing. Call, call, call.

Gibberish. His mind was gone.

“That one there,” the nurse said, pointing her clipboard at the moaning girl. “Her chart says she can fly, but I’ve never seen her so much as lift an inch out of that bed. As for the other one, she’s meant to be invisible. But she’s plain as day.”

“Were they tortured?” Emma asked.

“Obviously — they were tortured out of their minds!” said the clown. “Tortured until they forgot how to be peculiar!”

“You could torture me all day long,” said Millard. “I’d never forget how to be invisible.”

“Show them the scars,” said the clown to the nurse.

The nurse crossed to the motionless woman and pulled back her sheets. There were thin red scars across her stomach, along the side of her neck, and beneath her chin, each about the length of a cigarette.

“I’d hardly call this evidence of torture,” said Millard.

“Then what would you call it?” the nurse said angrily.

Ignoring her question, Millard said, “Are there more scars, or is this all she has?”

“Not by a long shot,” said the nurse, and she whisked the sheets off to expose the woman’s legs, pointing out scars on the back of the woman’s knee, her inner thigh, and the bottom of her foot.

Millard bent to examine the foot. “That’s odd placement, wouldn’t you say?”

“What are you getting at, Mill?” said Emma.

“Hush,” said Enoch. “Let him play Sherlock if he wants. I’m rather enjoying this.”

“Why don’t we cut him in ten places?” said the clown. “Then we’ll see if he thinks it’s torture!”

Millard crossed the room to the whispering man’s bed. “May I examine him?”

“I’m sure he won’t object,” said the nurse.

Millard lifted the man’s sheets from his legs. On the bottom of one of his bare feet was a scar identical to the motionless woman’s.

The nurse gestured toward the writhing woman. “She’s got one too, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Enough of this,” said the folding man. “If that is not torture, then what?”

“Exploration,” said Millard. “These incisions are precise and surgical. Not meant to inflict pain — probably done under anesthetic, even. The wights were looking for something.”

“And what was that?” Emma asked, though she seemed to dread the answer.

“There’s an old saying about a peculiar’s foot,” said Millard.

“Do any of you remember it?”

Horace recited it. “A peculiar’s sole is the door to his soul,” he said. “It’s just something they tell kids, though, to get them to wear shoes when they play outside.”

“Maybe it is and maybe it’s not,” said Millard.

“Don’t be ridiculous! You think they were looking for — ”

“Their souls. And they found them.”

The clown laughed out loud. “What a pile of baloney. Just because they lost their abilities, you think their second souls were removed?”

“Partly. We know the wights have been interested in the second soul for years now.”

Then I remembered the conversation Millard and I had had on the train, and I said, “But you told me yourself that the peculiar soul is what allows us to enter loops. So if these people don’t have their souls, how are they here?”

“Well, they’re not really here, are they?” said Millard. “By which I mean, their minds are certainly elsewhere.”

“Now you’re grasping at straws,” said Emma. “I think you’ve taken this far enough, Millard.”

“Bear with me for just a moment longer,” Millard said. He was pacing now, getting excited. “I don’t suppose you heard about the time a normal actually did enter a loop?”

“No, because everyone knows that’s impossible,” said Enoch.

“It nearly is,” said Millard. “It isn’t easy and it isn’t pretty, but it has been done — once. An illegal experiment conducted by Miss Peregrine’s own brother, I believe, in the years before he went mad and formed the splinter group that would become the wights.”

“Then why haven’t I ever heard about this?” said Enoch.

“Because it was extremely controversial and the results were immediately covered up, so no one would attempt to replicate them. In any event, it turns out that you can bring a normal into a loop, but they have to be forced through, and only someone with an ymbryne’s power can do it. But because normals do not have a second soul, they cannot handle a time loop’s inherent paradoxes, and their brains turn to mush. They become drooling, catatonic vegetables from the moment they enter. Not unlike these poor people before us.”

There was a moment of quiet while Millard’s words registered. Then Emma’s hands went to her mouth and she said quietly, “Oh, hell. He’s right.”

“Well, then,” said the clown. “In that case, things are even worse than we thought.”

I felt the air go out of the room.

“I’m not sure I follow,” said Horace.

“He said the monsters stole their souls!” Olive shouted, and then she ran crying to Bronwyn and buried her face in her coat.

“These peculiars didn’t lose their abilities,” said Millard. “They were stolen from them — extracted, along with their souls, which were then fed to hollowgast. This allowed the hollows to evolve sufficiently to enter loops, a development which enabled their recent assault on peculiardom — and netted the wights even more kidnapped peculiars whose souls they could extract, with which they evolved still more hollows, and so on, in a vicious cycle.”

“Then it isn’t just the ymbrynes they want,” said Emma. “It’s us, too — and our souls.”

Hugh stood at the foot of the whispering man’s bed, his last bee buzzing angrily around him. “All the peculiar children they kidnapped over the years … this is what they were doing to them? I figured they just became hollowgast food. But this … this is leagues more evil.”

“Who’s to say they don’t mean to extract the ymbrynes’ souls, too?” said Enoch.

That sent a special chill through us. The clown turned to Horace and said, “How’s your best-case scenario looking now, fella?”

“Don’t tease me,” Horace replied. “I bite.”

“Everyone out!” ordered the nurse. “Souls or no souls, these people are ill. This is no place to bicker.”

We filed sullenly into the hall.

“All right, you’ve given us the horror show,” Emma said to the clown and the folding man, “and we are duly horrified. Now tell us what you want.”

“Simple,” said the folding man. “We want you to stay and fight with us.”

“We just figured we’d show you how much it’s in your own best interest to do so,” said the clown. He clapped Millard on the back. “But your friend here did a better job of that than we ever could’ve.”

“Stay here and fight for what?” Enoch said. “The ymbrynes aren’t even in London — Miss Wren said as much.”

“Forget London! London’s finished!” the clown said. “The battle’s over here. We lost. As soon as Wren has saved every last peculiar she can from these ruined loops, we’ll posse up and travel — to other lands, other loops. There must be more survivors out there, peculiars like us, with the fight still burning in them.”

“We will build army,” said the folding man. “Real one.”

“As for finding out where the ymbrynes are,” said the clown, “no problem. We’ll catch a wight and torture it out of him. Make him show us on the Map of Days.”

“You have a Map of Days?” said Millard.

“We have two. The peculiar archives is downstairs, you know.”

“That is good news indeed,” Millard said, his voice charged with excitement.

“Catching a wight is easier said than done,” said Emma. “And they lie, of course. Lying is what they do best.”

“Then we’ll catch two and compare their lies,” the clown said.

“They come sniffing around here pretty often, so next time we see one — bam! We’ll grab him.”

“There’s no need to wait,” said Enoch. “Didn’t Miss Wren say there are wights in this very building?”

“Sure,” said the clown, “but they’re frozen. Dead as doornails.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t be interrogated,” Enoch said, a grin spreading across his face.

The clown turned to the folding man. “I’m really starting to like these weirdos.”

“Then you are with us?” said the folding man. “You stay and fight?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Emma. “Give us a minute to talk this over.”

“What is there to talk over?” said the clown.

“Of course, take all time you need,” said the folding man, and he pulled the clown down the hall with him. “Come, I will make coffee.”

“All right,” the clown said reluctantly.

We formed a huddle, just as we had so many times since our troubles began, only this time rather than shouting over one another, we spoke in orderly turns. The gravity of all this had put us in a solemn state of mind.

“I think we should fight,” said Hugh. “Now that we know what the wights are doing to us, I couldn’t live with myself if we just went back to the way things were, and tried to pretend none of this was happening. To fight is the only honorable thing.”

“There’s honor in survival, too,” said Millard. “Our kind survived the twentieth century by hiding, not fighting — so perhaps all we need is a better way to hide.”

Then Bronwyn turned to Emma and said, “I want to know what you think.”

“Yeah, I want to know what Emma thinks,” said Olive.

“Me too,” said Enoch, which took me by surprise.

Emma drew a long breath, then said, “I feel terrible for the other ymbrynes. It’s a crime what’s happened to them, and the future of our kind may depend on their rescue. But when all is said and done, my allegiance doesn’t belong to those other ymbrynes, or to other peculiar children. It belongs to the woman to whom I owe my life — Miss Peregrine, and Miss Peregrine alone.” She paused and nodded — as if testing and confirming the soundness of her own words — then continued. “And when, bird willing, she becomes herself again, I’ll do whatever she needs me to do. If she says fight, I’ll fight. If she wants to hide us away in a loop somewhere, I’ll go along with that, too. Either way, my creed has never changed: Miss Peregrine knows best.”

The others considered this. Finally Millard said, “Very wisely put, Miss Bloom.”

“Miss Peregrine knows best!” cheered Olive.

“Miss Peregrine knows best!” echoed Hugh.

“I don’t care what Miss Peregrine says,” said Horace. “I’ll fight.”

Enoch choked back a laugh. “You?”

“Everyone thinks I’m a coward. This is my chance to prove them wrong.”

“Don’t throw your life away because of a few jokes made at your expense,” said Hugh. “Who gives a whit what anyone else thinks?”

“It isn’t just that,” said Horace. “Remember the vision I had back on Cairnholm? I caught a glimpse of where the ymbrynes are being kept. I couldn’t show you on a map, but I’m sure of this — I’ll know it when I see it.” He tapped his forehead with his index finger.

“What I’ve got up here might just save those chaps a heap of trouble. And save those other ymbrynes, too.”

“If some fight and some stay behind,” said Bronwyn, “I’ll protect whoever stays. Protecting’s always been my vocation.”

And then Hugh turned to me and said, “What about you, Jacob?” and my mouth went instantly dry.

“Yeah,” said Enoch. “What about you?”

“Well,” I said, “I …”

“Let’s take a walk,” Emma said, hooking her arm around mine. “You and I need to have a chat.”

We walked slowly down the stairs, saying nothing to each other until we’d reached the bottom and the curved wall of ice where Althea had frozen shut the exit tunnel. We sat together and looked into the ice for a long while, at the forms trapped there, blurred and distorted in the darkening light, suspended like ancient eggs in blue amber. We sat, and I could tell from the silence collecting between us that this was going to be a hard conversation — one neither of us wanted to start.

Finally Emma said, “Well?”

I said, “I’m like the others — I want to know what you think.”

She laughed in the way people do when something’s not funny but awkward, and said, “I’m not entirely sure you do.”

She was right, but I prodded her to speak anyway. “Come on.”

Emma laid a hand on my knee, then retracted it. She fidgeted. My chest tightened.

“I think it’s time you went home,” she said finally.

I blinked. It took a moment to convince myself she’d really said it. “I don’t understand,” I mumbled.

“You said yourself you were sent here for a reason,” she said quickly, staring into her lap, “and that was to help Miss Peregrine. Now it seems she may be saved. If you owed her any debts, they’re paid. You helped us more than you’ll ever realize. And now it’s time for you to go home.” Her words came all in a rush, like they were a painful thing she’d been carrying a long time, and it was a relief to finally be rid of them.

“This is my home,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” she insisted, looking at me now. “Peculiardom is dying, Jacob. It’s a lost dream. And even if somehow, by some miracle, we were to take up arms against the corrupted and prevail, we’d be left with a shadow of what we once had; a shattered mess. You have a home — one that isn’t ruined — and parents who are alive, and who love you, in some measure.”

“I told you. I don’t want those things. I chose this.”

“You made a promise, and you’ve kept it. And now that’s over, and it’s time for you to go home.”

“Quit saying that!” I shouted. “Why are you pushing me away?”

“Because you have a real home and a real family, and if you think any of us would’ve chosen this world over those things — wouldn’t have given up our loops and longevity and peculiar powers long ago for even a taste of what you have — then you really are living in a fantasy world. It makes me absolutely ill to think you might throw that all away — and for what?”

“For you, you idiot! I love you!”

I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Neither could Emma — her mouth had fallen open. “No,” she said, shaking her head like she could erase my words. “No, that’s not going to help anything.”

“But it’s true!” I said. “Why do you think I stayed instead of going home? It wasn’t because of my grandfather or some stupid sense of duty — not really — or because I hated my parents or didn’t appreciate my home and all the nice things we had. I stayed because of you!”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, just nodded and then looked away and ran her hands through her hair, revealing a streak of white concrete dust I hadn’t noticed before, which made her look suddenly older. “It’s my own fault,” she said finally. “I should never have kissed you. Perhaps I made you believe something that wasn’t true.”

That stung me, and I recoiled instinctively, as if to protect myself. “Don’t say that to me if you don’t mean it,” I said. “I may not have a lot of dating experience, but don’t treat me like some pathetic loser who’s powerless in the face of a pretty girl. You didn’t make me stay. I stayed because I wanted to — and because what I feel for you is as real as anything I’ve ever felt.” I let that hang in the air between us for a moment, feeling the truth of it. “You feel it too,” I said. “I know you do.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, that was cruel, and I shouldn’t have said it.” Her eyes watered a little and she wiped at them with her hand. She had tried to make herself like stone, but now the facade was falling away. “You’re right,” she said. “I care about you very much. That’s why I can’t watch you throw your life away for nothing.”

“I wouldn’t be!”

“Dammit, Jacob, yes you would!” She was so incensed that she inadvertently lit a fire in her hand — which, luckily, she’d since removed from my knee. She clapped her hands together, snuffed the flame, and then stood up. Pointing into the ice, she said, “See that potted plant on the desk in there?”

I saw. Nodded.

“It’s green now, preserved by the ice. But inside it’s dead. And the moment that ice melts, it’ll turn brown and wither into mush.” She locked eyes with me. “I’m like that plant.”

“You aren’t,” I said. “You’re … perfect.”

Her face tightened into a expression of forced patience, as if she were explaining something to a thick-headed child. She sat down again, took my hand, and raised it to her smooth cheek. “This?” she said. “Is a lie. It’s not really me. If you could see me for what I really am, you wouldn’t want me anymore.”

“I don’t care about that stuff — ”

“I’m an old woman!” she said. “You think we’re alike, but we aren’t. This person you say you love? She’s really a hag, an old crone hiding in a body of a girl. You’re a young man — a boy — a baby compared to me. You could never understand what it’s like, being this close to death all the time. And you shouldn’t. I never want you to. You’ve still got your whole life to look forward to, Jacob. I’ve already spent mine. And one day — soon, perhaps — I will die and return to dust.”

She said it with such cold finality that I knew she believed it. It hurt her to say these things, just as it hurt me to hear them, but I understood why she was doing it. She was, in her way, trying to save me.

It stung anyway — partly because I knew she was right. If Miss Peregrine recovered, then I would have done what I’d set out to do: solved the mystery of my grandfather; settled my family’s debts to Miss Peregrine; lived the extraordinary life I’d always dreamed of — or part of one, anyway. At which point my only remaining obligation was to my parents. As for Emma, I didn’t care at all that she was older than me, or different from me, but she’d made up her mind that I should and it seemed there was no convincing her otherwise.

“Maybe when this is all over,” she said, “I’ll send you a letter, and you’ll send one back. And maybe one day you can come see me again.”

A letter. I thought of the dusty box of them I’d found in her room, written by my grandfather. Was that all I’d be to her? An old man across the ocean? A memory? And I realized that I was about to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps in a way I’d never thought possible. In so many ways, I was living his life. And probably, one day, my guard would relax too much, I’d get old and slow and distracted, and I would die his death. And Emma would continue on without me, without either of us, and one day maybe someone would find my letters in her closet, in a box beside my grandfather’s, and wonder who we were to her.

“What if you need me?” I said. “What if the hollows come back?”

Tears shimmered in her eyes. “We’ll manage somehow,” she said. “Look, I can’t talk about this anymore. I honestly don’t think my heart can take it. Shall we go upstairs and tell the others your decision?”

I clenched my jaw, suddenly irritated by how hard she was pushing me. “I haven’t decided anything,” I said. “You have.”

“Jacob, I just told you — ”

“Right, you told me. But I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

She crossed her arms. “Then I can wait.”

“No,” I said, and stood up. “I need to be by myself for a while.”

And I went up the stairs without her.

CHAPTER XIII

I moved quietly through the halls. I stood outside the ymbryne meeting room for a while, listening to muffled voices through the door, but I didn’t go in. I peeked into the nurse’s room and saw her dozing on a stool between the single-souled peculiars. I cracked the door to Miss Wren’s room and saw her rocking Miss Peregrine in her lap, gently kneading her fingers into the bird’s feathers. I said nothing to anyone.

Wandering through empty halls and ransacked offices, I tried to imagine what home would feel like, if after all this I chose to go back. What I would tell my parents. I’d tell them nothing, most likely. They’d never believe me, anyway. I would say I’d gotten mad, written a letter to my father filled with crazy stories, then caught a boat to the mainland and run away. They’d call it a stress reaction. Chalk it up to some invented disorder and adjust my meds accordingly. Blame Dr. Golan for suggesting I go to Wales. Dr. Golan, whom of course they’d never hear from again. He’d skipped town, they’d say, because he was a fraud, a quack whom we never should’ve trusted. And I’d go back to being Jacob the poor, traumatized, mentally disturbed rich kid.

It sounded like a prison sentence. And yet, if my best reason for staying in peculiardom didn’t want me anymore, I wouldn’t debase myself by clinging to her. I had my pride.

How long could I stand Florida, now that I’d had a taste of this peculiar life? I was not nearly as ordinary as I used to be — or if it was true that I’d never been ordinary, now I knew it. I had changed. And that, at least, gave me some hope: that even under ordinary circumstances, I still might find a way to live an extraordinary life.

Yes, it was best to go. It really was best. If this world was dying and there was nothing to be done for it, then what was left for me here? To run and hide until there was no safe place left to go, no loop to sustain my friends’ artificial youth. To watch them die. To hold Emma as she crumbled and broke apart in my arms.

That would kill me faster than any hollow could.

So yes, I would go. Salvage what was left of my old life. Goodbye, peculiars. Goodbye, peculiardom.

It was for the best.

I wandered until I came to a place where the rooms were only half frozen, and the ice had risen halfway to the ceiling like water in a sinking ship and then stopped, leaving the tops of desks and the heads of lamps sticking out like faltering swimmers. Beyond the iced windows the sun was sinking. Shadows bloomed across the walls and multiplied in the stairwells, and as the light died it got bluer, painting everything around me a deep-sea cobalt.

It occurred to me that this was probably my last night in peculiardom. My last night with the best friends I’d ever had. My last night with Emma.

Why was I spending it alone? Because I was sad, and Emma had hurt my pride, and I needed to sulk.

Enough of this.

Just as I turned to leave the room, though, I felt it: that old familiar twinge in my gut.

A hollow.

I stopped, waiting for another hit of pain. I needed more information. The intensity of the pain corresponded to the nearness of the hollow and the frequency of the hits with its strength. When two strong hollows had been chasing us, the Feeling had been one long, unbroken spasm, but now it was a long time before I felt another — nearly a minute — and when it came, it was so faint I wasn’t even sure I’d felt it.

I crept slowly out of the room and down the hall. As I passed the next doorway, I felt a third twinge: a little stronger now, but still only a whisper.

I tried to open the door carefully and quietly, but it was frozen shut. I had to yank on it, then rattle the door, then kick it, until finally it flew open to reveal a doorway and a room filled with ice that rose to mid-chest height. I approached the ice cautiously and peered across it, and even in the weak light, I saw the hollow right away. It was crouched on the floor, encased in ice up to its ink-black eyeballs. Only the top half of its head was exposed above the ice; the rest of it, the dangerous parts, its open jaws and all its teeth and tongues, were all caught below the surface.

The thing was just barely alive, its heart slowed almost to nothing, beating maybe once per minute. With each feeble pulse I felt a corresponding stitch of pain.

I stood at the mouth of the room and stared at it, fascinated and repulsed. It was unconscious, immobilized, totally vulnerable. It would’ve been easy to climb onto the ice and drive the point of an icicle into the hollow’s skull — and if anyone else had known it was here, I’m sure they would’ve done just that. But something stopped me. It was no threat to anyone now, this creature. Every hollow I’d come into contact with had left a mark on me. I saw their decaying faces in my dreams. Soon I’d be going home, where I’d no longer be Jacob the hollow-slayer. I didn’t want to take this one with me, too. It wasn’t my business anymore.

I backed out of the room and closed the door.

When I returned to the meeting hall, it was nearly dark outside and the room was black as night. Because Miss Wren wouldn’t allow the gaslamps to be lit for fear they’d be seen from the street, everyone had gathered around a few candles at the big oval table, some in chairs and others perched cross-legged on the table itself, talking in low voices and peering down at something.

At the creak of the heavy doors, everyone turned to look at me.

“Miss Wren?” Bronwyn said hopefully, straightening in her chair and squinting.

“It’s only Jacob,” said another shadowy form.

After a chorus of disappointed sighs, Bronwyn said, “Oh, hullo Jacob,” and returned her attention to the table.

As I walked toward them, I locked eyes with Emma. Holding her gaze, I saw something raw and unguarded there — a fear, I imagined, that I had in fact decided to do what she’d urged me to. Then her eyes dulled and she looked down again.

I’d been half hoping Emma had taken pity on me and told the others I was leaving already. But of course she hadn’t — I hadn’t told her yet. She seemed to know, though, just from reading my face as I crossed the room.

It was clear the others had no idea. They were so accustomed to my presence, they’d forgotten it was even under consideration. I steeled myself and asked for everyone’s attention.

“Wait a moment,” said a heavily accented voice, and in the candlelight I saw the snake girl and her python looking at me. “This boy here was just spewing a lot of rubbish about the place I hail from.” She turned to the only chair at the table which was empty and said, “My people call it Simhaladvipa — dwelling place of lions.”

From the chair Millard replied, “I’m sorry, but it says right here in plain calligraphy: The Land of Serendip. The peculiar cartographers who made this were not in the business of making things up!”

Then I got a little closer and saw what it was they were arguing over. It was a Map of Days, though a much larger edition than the one we’d lost at sea. This one stretched practically across the table, and was as thick as a brick stood on end. “I know my own home, and it’s called Simhaladvipa!” the snake girl insisted, and her python uncoiled from her neck and shot across the table to bang its nose against the Map, indicating a teardrop-shaped island off India’s coast. On this map, however, India was called Malabar, and the island, which I knew to be Sri Lanka, was overlaid with slinky script that read Land of Serendip.

“It’s pointless to argue,” said Millard. “Some places have as many names as they have occupants to name them. Now please ask your serpent to back away, lest he crinkle the pages.”

The snake girl harrumphed and muttered something, and the python slunk away to coil around her neck again. All the while, I couldn’t stop staring at the book. The one we’d lost was impressive enough, though I’d seen it opened only once, at night, by the skittish orange firelight of the burning home for peculiar children. This one was of another scale entirely. Not only was it orders of magnitude larger, but it was so ornate that it made the other look like so much leather-bound toilet paper. Colorful maps spilled across its pages, which were made from something stronger than paper, calfskin maybe, and edged with gold. Lush illustrations and legends and blocks of explanatory text stuffed the margins.

Millard noticed me admiring it and said, “Isn’t it stunning? Excepting perhaps the Codex Peculiaris, this edition of the Map is the finest book in all peculiardom. It took a team of cartographers, artists, and bookmakers a lifetime to create, and it’s said that Perplexus Anomalous himself drew some of the maps. I’ve wanted to see it in person ever since I was a boy. Oh, I am so pleased!”

“It’s really something,” I said, and it was.

“Millard was just showing us some of his favorite parts,” said Olive. “I like the pictures best!”

“To take their minds off things,” Millard explained, “and make the waiting easier. Here, Jacob, come and help me turn the pages.”

Rather than ruin Millard’s moment with my sad announcement, I decided it could wait a little while. I wasn’t going anywhere until morning, at least, and I wanted to enjoy a few more minutes with my friends unburdened by weightier things. I sidled up next to Millard and slipped my fingers under the page, which was so large that it took both my hands and his to turn.

We pored over the Map. I was absorbed by it — especially the far-flung and lesser-known parts. Naturally, Europe and its many loops were well-defined, but farther afield things got sketchier. Vast swaths of Africa were simply blank. Terra incognita. The same was true of Siberia, although the Map of Days had its own name for Russia’s Far East: The Great Far-Reaching Solitude.

“Are there loops in these places?” asked Olive, pointing to a void that stretched across much of China. “Are there peculiars there, like us?”

“Certainly there are,” Millard said. “Peculiarness is determined by genes, not geography. But large portions of the peculiar world have simply not been explored.”

“Why not?”

“I suppose we were too busy surviving.”

It occurred to me that the business of surviving precluded a great many things, exploring and falling in love not least among them.

We turned more pages, hunting for blank spots. There were many, and all had fanciful names. The Mournful Kingdom of Sand. The Land Made in Anger. A High Place Full of Stars. I mouthed the words silently to myself, appreciating their roundness.

At the margins lurked fearsome places the Map called Wastes. The far north of Scandinavia was The Icy Waste. The middle of Borneo: The Stifling Waste. Much of the Arabian peninsula: The Pitiless Waste. The southern tip of Patagonia: The Cheerless Waste. Certain places weren’t represented at all. New Zealand. Hawaii. Florida, which was just an ingrown nub at America’s foot, barely there.

Looking at the Map of Days, even the places that sounded most forbidding evoked in me a strange longing. It reminded me of long-ago afternoons spent with my grandfather studying historic maps in National Geographic — maps drawn long before the days of airplanes and satellites, when high-resolution cameras couldn’t see into the world’s every nook and cranny. When the shape of now-familiar coastlines was guesswork. When the depths and dimensions of icy seas and forbidding jungles were cobbled together from rumors and legends and the wild-eyed ramblings of expeditioners who’d lost half their party exploring them.

While Millard rambled on about the history of the Map, I traced with my finger a vast and trackless desert in Asia. Where the Winged Creature Ends Not Its Flight. Here was a whole world yet to be discovered, and I had only just cracked its surface. The thought filled me with regret — but also a shameful kind of relief. I would see my home again, after all, and my parents. And maybe it was childish, this old urge to explore for exploring’s sake. There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret.

Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

And then I told them. There was no point in waiting any longer. I just blurted it out: “I’m leaving,” I said. “When this is all over, I’m going back home.”

There was a moment of shocked silence. Emma met my eyes, finally, and I could see tears standing in them.

Then Bronwyn got up from the table and threw her arms around me. “Brother,” she said. “We’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” I said. “More than I can say.”

“But why?” said Olive, floating up to my eye level. “Was I too irritating?”

I put my hand on her head and pushed her back down to the floor. “No, no, it’s got nothing to do with you,” I said. “You were great, Olive.”

Emma stepped forward. “Jacob came here to help us,” she said. “But he has to go back to his old life, while it’s still there waiting for him.”

The children seemed to understand. There was no anger. Most of them seemed genuinely happy for me.

Miss Wren popped her head into the room to give us a quick update — everything was going marvelously, she said. Miss Peregrine was well on her way to recovery. She’d be ready by morning. And then Miss Wren was gone again.

“Thank the gods,” said Horace.

“Thank the birds,” said Hugh.

“Thank the gods and the birds,” said Bronwyn. “All the birds in all the trees in all the forests.”

“Thank Jacob, too,” said Millard. “We never would’ve made it this far without him.”

“We never even would’ve made it off the island,” said Bronwyn. “You’ve done so much for us, Jacob.”

They all came and hugged me, each of them, one by one. Then they drifted away and only Emma was left, and she hugged me last — a long, bittersweet embrace that felt too much like goodbye.

“Asking you to leave was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” she said. “I’m glad you came around. I don’t think I’d have had the strength to ask again.”

“I hate this,” I said. “I wish there were a world where we could be together in peace.”

“I know,” she said. “I know, I know.”

“I wish …,” I started to say.

“Stop,” she said.

I said it anyway. “I wish you could come home with me.”

She looked away. “You know what would happen to me if I did.”

“I know.”

Emma disliked long goodbyes. I could feel her steeling herself, trying to pull her pain inside. “So,” she said, businesslike. “Logistics. When Miss Peregrine turns human, she’ll lead you back through the carnival, into the underground, and when you pass through the changeover, you’ll be back in the present. Think you can manage from there?”

“I think so,” I said. “I’ll call my parents. Or go to a police station, or something. I’m sure there’s a poster of my face in every precinct in Britain by now, knowing my dad.” I laughed a little, because if I hadn’t, I might’ve started crying.

“Okay, then,” she said.

“Okay, then,” I said.

We looked at each other, not quite ready to let go, not sure what else to do. My instinct was to kiss her, but I stopped myself. That wasn’t allowed anymore.

“You go,” she said. “If you never hear from us again, well, one day you’ll be able to tell our story. You can tell your kids about us. Or your grandkids. And we won’t entirely be forgotten.”

I knew then that, from now on, every word that passed between us would hurt, would be wrapped up with and marked by the pain of this moment, and that I needed to pull away now or it would never stop. So I nodded sadly, hugged her one more time, and retreated to a corner to sleep, because I was very, very tired.

After awhile, the others dragged mattresses and blankets into the room and made a nest around me, and we packed together for warmth against the encroaching chill. But as the others began to bed down, I found myself unable to sleep, despite my exhaustion, and I got up and paced the room for a while, watching the children from a distance.

I’d felt so many things since our journey began — joy, fear, hope, horror — but until now, I’d never once felt alone. Bronwyn had called me brother, but that didn’t sound right anymore. I was a second cousin to them at best. Emma was right: I could never understand. They were so old, had seen so much. And I was from another world. Now it was time to go back.

Eventually, I fell asleep to the sound of ice groaning and cracking in the floors beneath us and the attic above. The building was alive with it.

That night, strange and urgent dreams.

I am home again, doing all the things I used to do. Tearing into a fast-food hamburger — big, brown, and greasy. Riding shotgun in Ricky’s Crown Vic, bad radio blaring. At the grocery store with my parents, sliding down long, too-bright aisles, and Emma is there, cooling her hands in the ice at the fish counter, meltwater running everywhere. She doesn’t recognize me.

Then I’m at the arcade where I had my twelfth birthday party, firing a plastic gun. Bodies bursting, blood-filled balloons.

Jacob where are you

Then school. Teacher’s writing on the board, but the letters don’t make sense. Then everyone’s on their feet, hurrying outside. Something’s wrong. A loud noise rising and falling. Everyone standing still, heads craned to the sky.

Air raid.

Jacob Jacob where are you

Hand on my shoulder. It’s an old man. A man without eyes. Come to steal mine. Not a man — a thing — a monster.

Running now. Chasing my old dog. Years ago she’d broken away from me, run off with her leash still attached and got it wrapped around a branch while trying to tree a squirrel. Strangled herself. We spent two weeks wandering the neighborhood calling her name. Found her after three. Old Snuffles.

The siren deafening now. I run and a car pulls alongside and picks me up. My parents are inside, in formal wear. They won’t look at me. The doors lock. We’re driving and it’s stifling hot outside, but the heater is on and the windows are up, and the radio is loud but tuned to the garble between stations.

Mom where are we going

She doesn’t answer.

Dad why are we stopping here

Then we’re out, walking, and I can breathe again. Pretty green place. Smell of fresh-cut grass. People in black, gathered around a hole in the ground.

A coffin open on a dais. I peer inside. It’s empty but for an oily stain slowly spreading across the bottom. Blacking the white satin. Quick, close the lid! Black tar bubbles out from the cracks and grooves and drips down into the grass and sinks into the earth.

Jacob where are you say something

The headstone reads: ABRAHAM EZRA PORTMAN. And I’m tumbling into his open grave, darkness spinning up to swallow me, and I keep falling and it’s bottomless, and then I’m somewhere underground, alone and wandering through a thousand interconnecting tunnels, and I’m wandering and it’s cold, so cold I’m afraid my skin will freeze and my bones will splinter, and everywhere there are yellow eyes watching me from the dark.

I follow his voice. Yakob, come here. Don’t be afraid.

The tunnel angles upward and there’s light at the end, and standing at its mouth, calmly reading a book, is a young man. And he looks just like me, or almost like me, and maybe he is me, I think, but then he speaks, and it’s my grandfather’s voice. I have something to show you.

For a moment I jolted awake in the dark and knew I was dreaming, but I didn’t know where I was, only that I was not in bed anymore, not in the meeting hall with the others. I’d gone elsewhere and the room I was in was all black, with ice beneath me, my stomach writhing …

Jacob come here where are you

A voice from outside, down the hall — a real voice, not something from a dream.

And then I’m in the dream again, just outside the ropes of a boxing ring, and on the canvas, in the haze and lights, my grandfather faces off against a hollowgast.

They circle each other. My grandfather is young and nimble on his feet, stripped to the waist, a knife in one hand. The hollow is bent and twisted, its tongues waving in the air, open jaws dripping black on the mat. It whips out a tongue and my grandfather dodges it.

Don’t fight the pain, that’s the key, my grandfather says. It’s telling you something. Welcome it, let it speak to you. The pain says: Hello, I am not other than you; I am of the hollow, but I am you also.

The hollow whips at him again. My grandfather anticipates it, makes room in advance of the strike. Then the hollow strikes a third time, and my grandfather lashes out with his knife and the tip of the hollow’s black tongue falls to the mat, severed and jolting.

They are stupid creatures. Highly suggestible. Speak to them, Yakob. And my grandfather begins to speak, but not in English, nor Polish, nor any language I’ve heard outside my dreams. It’s like some guttural outgassing, the sounds made with something other than a throat or a mouth.

And the creature stops moving, merely swaying where it stands, seemingly hypnotized. Still speaking his frightening gibberish, my grandfather lowers his knife and creeps toward it. The closer he gets, the more docile the creature becomes, finally sinking down to the mat, on its knees. I think it’s about to close its eyes and go to sleep when suddenly the hollow breaks free of whatever spell my grandfather has cast over it, and it lashes out with all its tongues and impales my grandfather. As he falls, I leap over the ropes and run toward him, and the hollow slips away. My grandfather is on his back on the mat and I am kneeling by his side, my hand on his face, and he is whispering something to me, blood bubbling on his lips, so I bend closer to hear him. You are more than me, Yakob, he says. You are more than I ever was.

I can feel his heart slow. Hear it, somehow, until whole seconds elapse between beats. Then tens of seconds. And then …

Jacob where are you

I jolted awake again. Now there was light in the room. It was morning, just the blue beginning of it. I was kneeling on the ice in the half-filled room, and my hand wasn’t on my grandfather’s face but resting atop the trapped hollow’s skull, its slow, reptilian brain. Its eyes were open and looking at me, and I was looking right back. I see you.

“Jacob! What are you doing? I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

It was Emma, frantic, out in the hall. “What are you doing?” she said again. She couldn’t see the hollow. Didn’t know it was there.

I took my hand away from its head, slid back from it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think I was sleepwalking.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Come quick — Miss Peregrine’s about to change!”

Crowded into the little room were all the children and all the freaks from the sideshow, pale and nervous, pressed against the walls and crouched on the floor in a wide berth around the two ymbrynes, like gamblers in a backroom cockfight. Emma and I slipped in among them and huddled in a corner, eyes glued to the unfolding spectacle. The room was a mess: the rocking chair where Miss Wren had sat all night with Miss Peregrine was toppled on its side, the table of vials and beakers pushed roughly against the wall. Althea stood on top of it clutching a net on a pole, ready to wield it.

In the middle of the floor were Miss Wren and Miss Peregrine. Miss Wren was on her knees, and she had Miss Peregrine pinned to the floorboards, her hands in thick falconing gloves, sweating and chanting in Old Peculiar, while Miss Peregrine squawked and flailed with her talons. But no matter how hard Miss Peregrine thrashed, Miss Wren wouldn’t let go.

At some point in the night, Miss Wren’s gentle massage had turned into something resembling an interspecies pro-wrestling match crossed with an exorcism. The bird half of Miss Peregrine had so thoroughly dominated her nature that it was refusing to be driven away without a fight. Both ymbrynes had sustained minor injuries: Miss Peregrine’s feathers were everywhere, and Miss Wren had a long, bloody scratch running down one side of her face. It was a disturbing sight, and many of the children looked on with openmouthed shock. Wild-eyed and savage, the bird Miss Wren was grinding into the floor was one we hardly recognized. It seemed incredible that a fully restored Miss Peregrine of old might result from this violent display, but Althea kept smiling at us and giving us encouraging nods as if to say, Almost there, just a little more floor-grinding!

For such a frail old lady, Miss Wren was giving Miss Peregrine a pretty good clobbering. But then the bird jabbed at Miss Wren with her beak and Miss Wren’s grasp slipped, and with a big flap of her wings Miss Peregrine nearly escaped from her hands. The children reacted with shouts and gasps. But Miss Wren was quick, and she leapt up and managed to catch Miss Peregrine by her hind leg and thump her down against the floorboards again, which made the children gasp even louder. We weren’t used to seeing our ymbryne treated like this, and Bronwyn actually had to stop Hugh from rushing into the fight to protect her.

Both ymbrynes seemed profoundly exhausted now, but Miss Peregrine more so; I could see her strength failing. Her human nature seemed to be winning out over her bird nature.

“Come on, Miss Wren!” Bronwyn cried.

“You can do it, Miss Wren!” called Horace. “Bring her back to us!”

“Please!” said Althea. “We require absolute silence.”

After a long time, Miss Peregrine quit struggling and lay on the ground with her wings splayed, gasping for air, feathered chest heaving. Miss Wren took her hands off the bird and sat back on her haunches.

“It’s about to happen,” she said, “and when it does, I don’t want any of you to rush over here grabbing at her. Your ymbryne will likely be very confused, and I want the first face she sees and voice she hears to be mine. I’ll need to explain to her what’s happened.” And then she clasped her hands to her chest and murmured, “Come back to us, Alma. Come on, sister. Come back to us.”

Althea stepped down from the table and picked up a sheet, which she unfolded and held up in front of Miss Peregrine to shield her from view. When ymbrynes turned from birds into humans, they were naked; this would give her some privacy.

We waited in breathless suspense while a succession of strange noises came from behind the sheet: an expulsion of air, a sound like someone clapping their hands once, sharply — and then Miss Wren jumped up and took a shaky step backward.

She looked frightened — her mouth was open, and so was Althea’s. And then Miss Wren said, “No, this can’t be,” and Althea stumbled, faint, letting the sheet drop. And there on the floor we saw a human form, but not a woman’s.

He was naked, curled into a ball, his back to us. He began to stir, and uncurl, and finally to stand.

“Is that Miss Peregrine?” said Olive. “She came out funny.”

Clearly, it was not. The person before us bore no resemblance whatsoever to Miss Peregrine. He was a stunted little man with knobby knees and a balding head and a nose like a used pencil eraser, and he was stark naked and slimed head to toe with sticky, translucent gel. While Miss Wren gaped at him and grasped for something to steady herself against, in shock and anger the others all began to shout, “Who are you? Who are you? What have you done with Miss Peregrine!”

Slowly, slowly, the man raised his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. Then, for the first time, he opened them.

The pupils were blank and white.

I heard someone scream.

Then, very calmly, the man said, “My name is Caul. And you are all my prisoners now.”

“Prisoners!” said the folding man with a laugh. “What he mean, we are prisoners?”

Emma shouted at Miss Wren. “Where’s Miss Peregrine? Who’s this man, and what have you done with Miss Peregrine?”

Miss Wren seemed to have lost the ability to speak.

As our confusion turned to shock and anger, we barraged the little man with questions. He endured them with a slightly bored expression, standing at the center of the room with his hands folded demurely over his privates.

“If you’d actually permit me to speak, I’ll explain everything,” he said.

“Where is Miss Peregrine?!” Emma shouted again, trembling with rage.

“Don’t worry,” Caul said, “she’s safely in our custody. We kidnapped her days ago, on your island.”

“Then the bird we rescued from the submarine,” I said, “that was …”

“That was me,” Caul said.

“Impossible!” said Miss Wren, finally finding her voice.

“Wights can’t turn into birds!”

“That is true, as a general rule. But Alma is my sister, you see, and though I wasn’t fortunate enough to inherit any of her talents for manipulating time, I do share her most useless trait — the ability to turn into a vicious little bird of prey. I did a rather excellent job impersonating her, don’t you think?” And he took a little bow. “Now, may I trouble you for some pants? You have me at a disadvantage.”

His request was ignored. Meanwhile, my head was spinning. I remembered Miss Peregrine once mentioning that she’d had two brothers — I’d seen their photo, actually, when they were all in the care of Miss Avocet together. Then I flashed back to the days we’d spent with the bird we had believed was Miss Peregrine; all we’d gone though, everything we’d seen. The caged Miss Peregrine that Golan had thrown into the ocean — that had been the real one, while the one we “rescued” had been her brother. The cruel things Miss Peregrine had done recently made more sense now — that hadn’t been Miss Peregrine at all — but I was still left with a million questions.

“All that time,” I said. “Why did you stay a bird? Just to watch us?”

“While my lengthy observations of your childish bickering were incontrovertibly fascinating, I was quite hoping you could help me with a piece of unfinished business. When you killed my men in the countryside, I was impressed. You proved yourselves to be quite resourceful. Naturally, my men could’ve swept in and taken you at any point after that, but I thought it better to let you twist in the wind awhile and see if your ingenuity might not lead us to the one ymbryne who’s consistently managed to evade us.” With that, he turned to Miss Wren and grinned broadly. “Hello, Balenciaga. So good to see you again.”

Miss Wren moaned and fanned herself with her hand.

“You idiots, you cretins, you morons!” the clown shouted.

“You led them right to us!”

“And as a nice bonus,” said Caul, “we paid a visit to your menagerie, as well! My men came by not long after we left; the stuffed heads of that emu-raffe and boxer dog will look magnificent above my mantelpiece.”

“You monster!” Miss Wren screeched, and she fell back against the table, legs failing her.

“Oh, my bird!” exclaimed Bronwyn, her eyes wide. “Fiona and Claire!”

“You’ll see them again soon,” Caul said. “I’ve got them in safekeeping.”

It all began to make a terrible kind of sense. Caul knew he’d be welcomed into Miss Wren’s menagerie disguised as Miss Peregrine, and when she wasn’t at home to be kidnapped, he’d nudged us after her, toward London. In so many ways, we’d been manipulated from the very beginning — from the moment we chose to leave the island and I chose to go along. Even the tale he’d chosen for Bronwyn to read that first night in the forest, about the stone giant, had been a manipulation. He wanted us to find Miss Wren’s loop, and think that it was we who’d cracked its secret.

Those of us who weren’t reeling in horror frothed with anger. Several people were shouting that Caul should be killed, and were busily hunting for sharp objects to do the job with, while the few who’d kept their heads were trying to hold them back. All the while, Caul stood calmly, waiting for the furor to die down.

“If I may?” he said. “I wouldn’t entertain any ideas about killing me. You could, of course; no one can stop you. But it will go much easier for you if I am unharmed when my men arrive.” He pretended to check a nonexistent watch on his wrist. “Ah, yes,” he said, “they should be here now — yes, just about now — surrounding the building, covering every conceivable point of exit, including the roof. And might I add, there are fifty-six of them and they are armed positively to the teeth. Beyond the teeth. Have you ever seen what a mini-gun can do to a child-sized human body?” He looked directly at Olive and said, “It would turn you to cat’s meat, darling.”

“You’re bluffing!” said Enoch. “There’s no one out there!”

“I assure you, there is. They’ve been watching me closely since we left your depressing little island, and I gave my signal to them the moment Balenciaga revealed herself to us. That was over twelve hours ago — more than ample time to muster a fighting force.”

“Allow me to verify this,” said Miss Wren, and she left to go to the ymbryne meeting room, where the windows were obstructed from ice mostly from the outside, and a few had small telescope tunnels melted through them with mirror attachments that let us look down at the street below.

While we waited for her to return, the clown and the snake girl debated the best ways to torture Caul.

“I say we pull out his toenails first,” said the clown. “Then stick hot pokers in his eyes.”

“Where I come from,” the snake girl said, “the punishment for treason is being covered in honey, bound to an open boat, and floated out into a stagnant pond. The flies eat you alive.”

Caul stood cricking his neck from side to side and stretching his arms boredly. “Apologies,” he said. “Remaining a bird for so long tends to cramp the muscles.”

“You think we’re kidding?” said the clown.

“I think you’re amateurs,” said Caul. “If you found a few young bamboo shoots, I could show you something really wicked. As delightful as that would be, though, I do recommend you melt this ice, because it’ll save us all a world of trouble. I say this for your sake, out of genuine concern for your well-being.”

“Yeah, right,” said Emma. “Where was your concern when you were stealing those peculiars’ souls?”

“Ah, yes. Our three pioneers. Their sacrifice was necessary — all for the sake of progress, my dears. What we’re trying to do is advance the peculiar species, you see.”

“What a joke,” she said. “You’re nothing but power-hungry sadists!”

“I know you’re all quite sheltered and uneducated,” said Caul, “but did your ymbrynes not teach you about our people’s history? We peculiars used to be like gods roaming the earth! Giants — kings — the world’s rightful rulers! But over the centuries and millennia, we’ve suffered a terrible decline. We mixed with normals to such an extent that the purity of our peculiar blood has been diluted almost to nothing. And now look at us, how degraded we’ve become! We hide in these temporal backwaters, afraid of the very people we should be ruling, arrested in a state of perpetual childhood by this confederacy of busybodies — these women! Don’t you see how they’ve reduced us? Are you not ashamed? Do you have any idea of the power that’s rightfully ours? Don’t you feel the blood of giants in your veins?” He was losing his cool now, going red in the face. “We aren’t trying to eradicate peculiardom — we’re trying to save it!”

“Is that right?” said the clown, and then walked over to Caul and spat right in his face. “Well, you’ve got a twisted way of going at it.”

Caul wiped the spit away with the back of his hand. “I knew it would be pointless to reason with you. The ymbrynes have been feeding you lies and propaganda for a hundred years. Better, I think, to take your souls and start again fresh.”

Miss Wren returned. “He speaks the truth,” she said. “There must be fifty soldiers out there. All of them armed.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” moaned Bronwyn, “what are we to do?”

“Give up,” said Caul. “Go quietly.”

“It doesn’t matter how many of them there are,” Althea said.

“They’ll never be able to get through all my ice.”

The ice! I’d nearly forgotten. We were inside a fortress of ice!

“That’s right!” Caul said brightly. “She’s absolutely right, they can’t get in. So there’s a quick and painless way to do this, where you melt the ice voluntarily right now, or there’s the long, stubborn, slow, boring, sad way, which is called a siege, where for weeks and months my men stand guard outside while we stay in here, quietly starving to death. Maybe you’ll give up when you’re desperate and hungry enough. Or maybe you’ll start cannibalizing one another. Either way, if my men have to wait that long, they’ll torture every last one of you to death when they get in, which inevitably they will. And if we must go the slow, boring, sad route, then please, for the sake of the children, bring me some trousers.”

“Althea, fetch the man some damned trousers!” said Miss Wren. “But do not, under any circumstances, melt this ice!”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied Althea, and she went out.

“Now,” said Miss Wren, turning to Caul. “Here’s what we’ll do. You tell your men to allow us safe passage out of here, or we’ll kill you. If we have to do it, I assure you we will, and we’ll dump your stinking corpse out a hole in the ice a piece at a time. While I’m sure your men won’t like that much, we’ll have a very long time to devise our next move.”

Caul shrugged and said, “Oh, all right.”

“Really?” Miss Wren said.

“I thought I could scare you,” he said, “but you’re right, I’d rather not be killed. So take me to one of these holes in the ice and I’ll do as you’ve asked and shout down to my men.”

Althea came back in with some pants and threw them at Caul, and he put them on. Miss Wren appointed Bronwyn, the clown, and the folding man to be Caul’s guards, arming them with broken icicles. With their points aimed at his back, we proceeded into the hall. But as we were bottlenecking through the small, dark office that led to the ymbryne meeting room, everything went wrong. Someone tripped over a mattress and went down, and then I heard a scuffle break out in the dark. Emma lit a flame just in time to see Caul dragging Althea away from us by the hair. She kicked and flailed while Caul held a sharpened icicle to her throat and shouted, “Stay back or I drive this through her jugular!”

We followed Caul at a careful distance. He dragged Althea thrashing and kicking into the meeting hall, and then up onto the oval table, where he put her in a choke hold, the icicle held an inch from her eye, and shouted, “These are my demands!”

Before he could get any further, though, Althea slapped the icicle from his hand. It flew and landed point-down in the pages of the Map of Days. While his mouth was still forming an O of surprise, Althea’s hand latched onto the front of Caul’s pants, and the O broadened into a grimace of shock.

“Now!” Emma bellowed, and then she and I and Bronwyn rushed toward them through the wooden doors. But as we ran, the distance across that big room seemed to yawn, and in seconds the fight between Althea and Caul had taken another turn: Caul let go of Althea and fell to the table, his arms stretched and grasping for the icicle. Althea fell with him but did not let go — now had both hands wrapped around his thigh — and a coating of ice was spreading quickly across Caul’s lower half, paralyzing him from the waist down and freezing Althea’s hands to his leg. He got one finger around the icicle, and then his whole hand, and groaning with effort and pain, he wrenched it free from the Map and twisted his upper body until he had the point of it poised above Althea’s back. He screamed at her to stop and let him go and melt the ice or he’d plunge it into her.

We were just yards from them now, but Bronwyn caught Emma and me and held us back.

Caul screamed, “Stop! Stop this!” as his face contorted in pain, the ice racing up his chest and over his shoulders. In a few seconds, his arms and hands would be encased, too.

Althea didn’t stop.

And then Caul did it — he stabbed the icicle into her back. She tensed in shock, then groaned. Miss Wren ran toward them, screaming Althea’s name while the ice that had spread across most of Caul’s body began, very quickly, to recede. By the time Miss Wren reached them, he was nearly free of it. But then the ice everywhere was melting, too — fading and retracting just as quickly as Althea’s life was — the ice in the attic dripping and raining down through the ceiling just as Althea’s own blood ran down her body. She was in Miss Wren’s arms now, slack, going.

Bronwyn was on the table, Caul’s throat in one hand, his weapon crushed to snow in her other. We could hear the ice in floors below us melting, too, and then it was gone from the windows. We rushed to look out, and could see water flooding from lower windows into the street, where soldiers in gray urban camo were clinging to lampposts and fire hydrants to keep from being washed away by the icy waves.

Then we heard their boots stomping on the stairs below and coming down from the roof above, and moments later they burst in with their guns, shouting. Some of the men wore night-vision headsets and all of them bristled with weapons — compact machine guns, laser-sighted pistols, combat knives. It took three of them to pry Bronwyn away from Caul, who wheezed through his half-crushed windpipe, “Take them away, and don’t be gentle!”

Miss Wren was shouting, begging us to comply — “Do as they say or they’ll hurt you!”—but she wouldn’t let go of Althea’s body, so they made an example of her; they tore Althea away and kicked Miss Wren to the ground, and one of the soldiers fired his machine pistol into the ceiling just to scare us. When I saw Emma about to make a fireball with her hands, I grabbed her by the arm and begged her not to — “Don’t, please don’t, they’ll kill you!”—and then a rifle butt slammed into my chest and I fell gasping to the floor. One of the soldiers noosed my hands together behind me.

I heard them counting us, Caul listing our names, making sure even Millard was accounted for — because of course by now, having spent the last three days with us, he knew all of us, knew everything about us.

I was pulled to my feet and we were all pushed out through the doors into the hallway. Stumbling along next to me was Emma, blood in her hair, and I whispered, “Please, just do what they say,” and though she didn’t acknowledge it, I knew she’d heard me. The look on her face was all rage and fear and shock — and I think pity, too, for all I’d just had snatched away from me.

In the stairwell, the floors and stairs below were a white-water river, a vortex of cascading waves. Up was the only way out. We were shoved up the stairs, through a door and into strong daylight, onto the roof. Everyone wet, frozen, frightened into silence.

All but Emma. “Where are you taking us?” she demanded.

Caul came right to her and grinned in her face while a soldier held her cuffed hands behind her. “A very special place,” Caul said, “where not a drop of your peculiar souls will go to waste.”

She flinched, and he laughed and turned away, stretching his arms above his head and yawning. From his shoulder blades jutted a weird pair of knobby protrusions, like the stems of aborted wings: the only outward clue that this twisted man bore any relation to an ymbryne.

Voices shouted from the top of another building. More soldiers. They were laying down a collapsible bridge between rooftops.

“What about the dead girl?” one of the soldiers asked.

“Such a pity, such a waste,” Caul said, clucking his tongue. “I should have liked to dine on her soul. It’s got no taste on its own, the peculiar soul,” he said, addressing us. “Its natural consistency is a bit gelatinous and pasty, really, but whipped together with a soupçon of remoulade and spread upon white meat, it’s quite palatable.”

Then he laughed, very loudly, for a long time.

As they led us away, one by one, over the wide collapsible bridge, I felt a familiar twinge in my gut — faint but strengthening, slow but quickening — the hollowgast, unfrozen now, coming slowly back to life.

Ten soldiers marched us out of the loop at gunpoint, past the carnival tents and sideshows and gaping carnival-goers, down the rats’ warren of alleys with their stalls and vendors and ragamuffin kids staring after us, into the disguising room, past the piles of cast-off clothes we’d left behind, and down into the underground. The soldiers prodded us along, barking at us to keep quiet (though no one had said a word in minutes), to keep our heads down and stay in line or be pistol-whipped.

Caul was no longer with us — he had stayed behind with the larger contingent of soldiers to “mop up,” which I think meant scouring the loop for hiders and stragglers. The last time we saw him, he was pulling on a pair of modern boots and an army jacket and told us he was absolutely sick of our faces but would see us “on the other side,” whatever that meant.

We passed through the changeover, and forward in time again — but not to a version of the tunnels I recognized. The tracks and ties were all metal now, and the lights in the tunnels were different, not red incandescents but flickering fluorescent tubes that glowed a sickly green. Then we came out of the tunnel and onto the platform, and I understood why: we were no longer in the nineteenth century, nor even the twentieth. The crowd of sheltering refugees was gone now; the station nearly deserted. The circular staircase we’d come down was gone, too, replaced by an escalator. A scrolling LED screen hung above the platform: TIME TO NEXT TRAIN: 2 MINUTES. On the wall was a poster for a movie I’d seen earlier in the summer, just before my grandfather died.

We’d left 1940 behind. I was back in the present.

A few of the kids took note of this with looks of surprise and fear, as if afraid they would age forward in a matter of minutes, but for most of them I think the shock of our sudden captivity was not about to be trumped by an unexpected trip to the present; they were worried about having their souls extracted, not about developing gray hair and liver spots.

The soldiers corralled us in the middle of the platform to wait for the train. Hard shoes clicked toward us. I risked a look over my shoulder and saw a policeman coming. Behind him, stepping off the escalator, were three more.

“Hey!” Enoch shouted. “Policeman, over here!”

A soldier punched Enoch in the gut, and he doubled over.

“Everything good here?” said the closest policeman.

“They’ve taken us prisoner!” said Bronwyn. “They aren’t really soldiers, they’re — ”

And then she got a punch to the gut, too, though it didn’t seem to hurt her. What stopped her from saying more was the policeman himself, who took off his mirrored sunglasses to reveal stark white eyes. Bronwyn shrank back.

“A bit of advice,” the policeman said. “No help is coming to you. We are everywhere. Accept that, and this will all be easier.”

Normals were starting to fill the station. The soldiers pressed in on us from all sides, keeping their weapons hidden.

A train hissed into the station, filled with people. Its electric doors whooshed open and a glut of passengers spilled out. The soldiers began pushing us toward the nearest car, the policemen going ahead to scatter what few passengers remained inside. “Find another car!” they barked. “Get out!” The passengers grumbled but complied. But there were more people behind us on the platform, trying to push into the car, and a few of the soldiers who’d been ringing us had to break away to stop them. And then there was just enough confusion — the doors trying to close but the police holding them open until a warning alarm began to sound; the soldiers shoving us forward so hard that Enoch tripped, sending other children tripping over him in a chain reaction — that the folding man, whose wrists were so skinny he’d been able to slip his cuffs, decided to make a break for it, and ran.

A shot rang out, then a second, and the folding man tumbled and splayed onto the ground. The crowd swarmed away in a panic, people screaming and scrambling to escape the gunshots, and what had been merely confusion deteriorated into total chaos.

Then they were shoving us and kicking us onto the train. Beside me, Emma was resisting, making the soldier who was pushing her get close. Then I saw her cuffed hands flare orange, and she reached behind her and grabbed him. The soldier crumpled to the ground, shrieking, a hand-shaped hole melted through his camo. Then the soldier who was pushing me raised the butt of his gun and was about to bring it down on Emma’s neck when some instinct triggered in me and I drove my shoulder into his back.

He stumbled.

Emma melted through her metal cuffs, which fell away from her hands in a deformed mass of red-hot metal. My soldier turned his gun on me now, howling with rage, but before he could fire, Emma came at him from behind and clapped her hands around his face, her fingers so hot they melted through his cheeks like warm butter. He dropped the gun and collapsed, screaming.

All this happened very quickly, in a matter of seconds.

Then two more soldiers were coming at us. Nearly everyone else was on the train now — all but Bronwyn and the blind brothers, who had never been cuffed and were merely standing by with arms linked. Seeing that we were about to be shot to death, Bronwyn did something I could never have imagined her doing under any other circumstances: she slapped the older brother hard across the face, then took the younger one and wrenched him roughly away from the older.

The moment their connection was severed, they let out a scream so powerful it generated its own wind. It tore through the station like a tornado of pure energy — blowing Emma and me backwards, shattering the soldiers’ glasses, eclipsing most of the frequencies my ears could detect so that all I heard was a squeaking, high-pitched Eeeeeeeeee …

I saw all the windows of the train break and the LED screens shiver to knife shards and the glass light tubes along the roof explode, so that we were plunged for a moment into pure blackness, then the hysterical red flashing of emergency lights.

I had fallen onto my back, the wind knocked out of me, my ears ringing. Something was pulling me backwards by the collar, away from the train, and I couldn’t quite remember how to work my arms and legs well enough to resist. Beneath the ringing in my ears I could make out frantic voices shouting, “Go, just go!”

I felt something cold and wet against the back of my neck, and was dragged into a phone booth. Emma was there, too, folded into a ball in the corner, semiconscious.

“Pull your legs up,” I heard a familiar voice say, and from around back of me came trotting a short, furry thing with a pushedin snout and a jowly mouth.

The dog. Addison.

I pulled my legs into the booth, my wits returning enough to move but not speak.

The last thing I saw, in the hellish red flashing, was Miss Wren being shoved into the train car and the doors snapping closed, and all my friends inside with her, cowering at gunpoint, framed by the shattered windows of the train, surrounded by men with white eyes.

Then the train roared away into the darkness, and was gone.

I startled awake to a tongue licking my face.

The dog.

The door of the phone booth had been pulled closed, and the three of us were crammed inside on the floor.

“You passed out,” said the dog.

“They’re gone,” I said.

“Yes, but we can’t stay here. They’ll come back for you. We have to go.”

“I don’t think I can stand up just yet.”

The dog had a cut on his nose, and a hunk of one ear was missing. Whatever he’d done to get here, he’d been through hell, too.

I felt a tickle against my leg, but was too tired to look and see what it was. My head was heavy as a boulder.

“Don’t go to sleep again,” said the dog, and then he turned to Emma and began to lick her face.

The tickle again. This time I shifted my weight and reached for it.

It was my phone. My phone was vibrating. I couldn’t believe it. I dug it out of my pocket. The battery was nearly dead, the signal almost nonexistent. The screen read: DAD (177 MISSED CALLS).

If I hadn’t been so groggy, I probably wouldn’t have answered. At any moment a man with a gun might arrive to finish us off. Not a good time for a conversation with my father. But I wasn’t thinking straight, and anytime my phone rang, my old Pavlovian impulse was to pick it up.

I pressed ANSWER. “Hello?”

A choked cry on the other end. Then: “Jacob? Is that you?”

“It’s me.”

I must’ve sounded awful. My voice a faint rasp.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” my father said. He hadn’t expected me to answer, maybe had given me up for dead already and was calling now out of some reflexive grief instinct that he couldn’t switch off. “I don’t — where did you — what happened — where are you, son?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m alive. In London.”

I don’t know why I told him that last part. I guess I felt like I owed him some truth.

Then it sounded like he aimed his head away from the receiver to shout to someone else, “It’s Jacob! He’s in London!” Then back to me: “We thought you were dead.”

“I know. I mean, I’m not surprised. I’m sorry about leaving the way I did. I hope I didn’t scare you too much.”

“You scared us to death, Jacob.” My father sighed, a long, shivering sound that was relief and disbelief and exasperation all at once. “Your mother and I are in London, too. After the police couldn’t find you on the island … anyway, it doesn’t matter, just tell us where you are and we’ll come get you!”

Emma began to stir. Her eyes opened and she looked at me, bleary, like she was somewhere deep inside herself and peering out at me through miles of brain and body. Addison said, “Good, very good, now stay with us,” and began licking her hand instead.

I said into the phone, “I can’t come, Dad. I can’t drag you into this.”

“Oh, God, I knew it. You’re on drugs, aren’t you? Look, whoever you’ve gotten mixed up with, we can help. We don’t have to bring the police into it. We just want you back.”

Then everything went dark for a second in my head, and when I came to again, I felt such a gut-punch of pain in my belly that I dropped the phone.

Addison jerked his head up to look at me. “What is it?”

That’s when I saw a long, black tongue pressing against the outside of the booth’s glass. It was quickly joined by a second, then a third.

The hollow. The unfrozen hollowgast. It had followed us.

The dog couldn’t see it, but he could read the look on my face easily enough. “It’s one of them, isn’t it?”

I mouthed, Yes, and Addison shrank into a corner.

“Jacob?” My dad’s tinny voice from the phone. “Jacob, are you there?”

The tongues began to wrap around the booth, encircling us. I didn’t know what to do, only that I had to do something, so I shifted my feet under me, planted my hands on the walls, and struggled to my feet.

Then I was face to face with it. Tongues fanned from its gaping, bladed mouth. Its eyes were black and weeping more black and they stared into mine, inches away through the glass. The hollow let out a low, guttural snarl that turned my insides to jelly, and I half wished the beast would just kill me and be done with it so all this pain and terror could end.

The dog barked in Emma’s face. “Wake up! We need you, girl! Make your fire!”

But Emma could neither speak nor stand, and we were alone in the underground station but for two women in raincoats who were backing away, holding their noses against the hollow’s fetid stench.

And then the booth, the whole booth with all of us in it, swayed one way and then the other, and I heard whatever bolts anchored it to the floor groan and snap. Slowly, the hollow lifted us off the ground — six inches, then a foot, then two — only to slam us back down again, shattering the booth windows, raining glass on us.

Then there was nothing at all between the hollow and me. Not an inch, not a pane of glass. Its tongues wriggled into the booth, snaking around my arm, my waist, then around my neck, squeezing tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe.

That’s when I knew I was dead. And because I was dead, and there was nothing I could do, I stopped fighting. I relaxed every muscle, closed my eyes, and gave in to the hurt bursting inside my belly like fireworks.

Then a strange thing happened: the hurt stopped hurting. The pain shifted and became something else. I entered into it, and it enveloped me, and beneath its roiling surface I discovered something quiet and gentle.

A whisper.

I opened my eyes again. The hollow seemed frozen now, staring at me. I stared back, unafraid. My vision was spotting black from lack of oxygen, but I felt no pain.

The hollow’s grip on my neck relaxed. I took my first breath in minutes, calm and deep. And then the whisper I’d found inside me traveled up from my belly and out of my throat and past my lips, making a noise that didn’t sound like language, but whose meaning I knew innately.

Back.

Off.

The hollow retracted its tongues. Drew them all back into its bulging mouth and shut its jaws. Bowed its head slightly — a gesture, almost, of submission.

And then it sat down.

Emma and Addison looked up at me from the floor, surprised by the sudden calm. “What just happened?” said the dog.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said.

“Is it gone?”

“No, but it won’t hurt us now.”

He didn’t ask how I knew this; just nodded, assured by the tone of my voice.

I opened the booth door and helped Emma to her feet. “Can you walk?” I asked her. She put an arm around my waist, leaned her weight against mine, and together we took a step. “I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Whether you like it or not.”

Into my ear she whispered, “I love you, Jacob.”

“I love you, too,” I whispered back.

I stooped to pick up the phone. “Dad?”

“What was that noise? Who are you with?”

“I’m here. I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not. Just stay where you are.”

“Dad, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

“Wait. Don’t hang up,” he said. “You’re confused, Jake.”

“No. I’m like Grandpa. I have what Grandpa had.”

A pause on the other end. Then: “Please come home.”

I took a breath. There was too much to say and no time to say it. This would have to do:

“I hope I’ll be able to come home, someday. But there are things I need to do first. I just want you to know I love you and Mom, and I’m not doing any of this to hurt you.”

“We love you, too, Jake, and if it’s drugs, or whatever it is, we don’t care. We’ll get you right again. Like I said, you’re confused.”

“No, Dad. I’m peculiar.”

Then I hung up the phone, and speaking a language I didn’t know I knew, I ordered the hollow to stand.

Obedient as a shadow, it did.