Hollow City

CHAPTER I

We rowed out through the harbor, past bobbing boats weeping rust from their seams, past juries of silent seabirds roosting atop the barnacled remains of sunken docks, past fishermen who lowered their nets to stare frozenly as we slipped by, uncertain whether we were real or imagined; a procession of waterborne ghosts, or ghosts soon to be. We were ten children and one bird in three small and unsteady boats, rowing with quiet intensity straight out to sea, the only safe harbor for miles receding quickly behind us, craggy and magical in the blue-gold light of dawn. Our goal, the rutted coast of mainland Wales, was somewhere before us but only dimly visible, an inky smudge squatting along the far horizon.

We rowed past the old lighthouse, tranquil in the distance, which only last night had been the scene of so many traumas. It was there that, with bombs exploding around us, we had nearly drowned, nearly been torn apart by bullets; that I had taken a gun and pulled its trigger and killed a man, an act still incomprehensible to me; that we had lost Miss Peregrine and got her back again — snatched from the steel jaws of a submarine — though the Miss Peregrine who was returned to us was damaged, in need of help we didn’t know how to give. She perched now on the stern of our boat, watching the sanctuary she’d created slip away, more lost with every oar stroke.

Finally we rowed past the breakwater and into the great blank open, and the glassy surface of the harbor gave way to little waves that chopped at the sides of our boats. I heard a plane threading the clouds high above us and let my oars drag, neck craning up, arrested by a vision of our little armada from such a height: this world I had chosen, and everything I had in it, and all our precious, peculiar lives, contained in three splinters of wood adrift upon the vast, unblinking eye of the sea.

Mercy.

Our boats slid easily through the waves, three abreast, a friendly current bearing us coastward. We rowed in shifts, taking turns at the oars to stave off exhaustion, though I felt so strong that for nearly an hour I refused to give them up. I lost myself in the rhythm of the strokes, my arms tracing long ellipses in the air as if pulling something toward me that refused to come. Hugh manned the oars opposite me, and behind him, at the bow, sat Emma, her eyes hidden beneath the brim of a sun hat, head bent toward a map spread across her knees. Every so often she’d look up from her map to consult the horizon, and just the sight of her face in the sun gave me energy I didn’t know I had.

I felt like I could row forever — until Horace shouted from one of the other boats to ask how much ocean was left between us and the mainland, and Emma squinted back toward the island and then down at her map, measuring with spread fingers, and said, somewhat doubtfully, “Seven kilometers?” But then Millard, who was also in our boat, muttered something in her ear and she frowned and turned the map sideways, and frowned again, then said, “I mean, eight and a half.” As the words left her mouth, I felt myself — and saw everyone else — wilt a little.

Eight and a half kilometers: a journey that would’ve taken an hour in the stomach-churning ferry that had brought me to Cairnholm weeks ago. A distance easily covered by an engine-powered boat of any size. One and a half kilometers less than my out-of-shape uncles ran on odd weekends for charity, and only a few more than my mother boasted she could manage during rowing-machine classes at her fancy gym. But the ferry between the island and the mainland wouldn’t start running for another thirty years, and rowing machines weren’t loaded down with passengers and luggage, nor did they require constant course corrections just to stay pointed in the right direction. Worse still, the ditch of water we were crossing was treacherous, a notorious ship-swallower: eight and a half kilometers of moody, changeable sea, its floor fanned with greening wrecks and sailors’ bones and, lurking somewhere in the fathoms-deep darkness, our enemies.

Those of us who worried about such things assumed the wights were nearby, somewhere below us in that German submarine, waiting. If they didn’t already know we’d fled the island, they’d find out soon enough. They hadn’t gone to such lengths to kidnap Miss Peregrine only to give up after one failed attempt. The warships that inched along like centipedes in the distance and the British planes that kept watch overhead made it too dangerous for the submarine to surface in broad daylight, but come nightfall, we’d be easy prey. They would come for us, and take Miss Peregrine, and sink the rest. So we rowed, our only hope that we could reach the mainland before nightfall reached us.

We rowed until our arms ached and our shoulders knotted. We rowed until the morning breeze stilled and the sun blazed down as through a magnifying glass and sweat pooled around our collars, and I realized no one had thought to bring fresh water, and that sunblock in 1940 meant standing in the shade. We rowed until the skin wore away from the ridges of our palms and we were certain we absolutely couldn’t row another stroke, but then did, and then another, and another.

“You’re sweating buckets,” Emma said. “Let me have a go at the oars before you melt away.”

Her voice startled me out of a daze. I nodded gratefully and let her switch into the oar seat, but twenty minutes later I asked for it back again. I didn’t like the thoughts that crept into my head while my body was at rest: imagined scenes of my father waking to find me gone from our rooms on Cairnholm, Emma’s baffling letter in my place; the panic that would ensue. Memory-flashes of terrible things I’d witnessed recently: a monster pulling me into its jaws; my former psychiatrist falling to his death; a man buried in a coffin of ice, torn momentarily from the next world to croak into my ear with half a throat. So I rowed despite my exhaustion and a spine that felt like it might never bend straight again and hands rubbed raw from friction, and tried to think of exactly nothing, those leaden oars both a life sentence and a life raft.

Bronwyn, seemingly inexhaustible, rowed one of the boats all by herself. Olive sat opposite but was no help; the tiny girl couldn’t pull the oars without pushing herself up into the air, where a stray gust of wind might send her flying away like a kite. So Olive shouted encouragement while Bronwyn did the work of two — or three or four, if you took into account all the suitcases and boxes weighing down their boat, stuffed with clothes and food and maps and books and a lot of less practical things, too, like several jars of pickled reptile hearts sloshing in Enoch’s duffel bag; or the blown-off front doorknob to Miss Peregrine’s house, a memento Hugh had found in the grass on our way to the boats and decided he couldn’t live without; or the bulky pillow Horace had rescued from the house’s flaming shell — it was his lucky pillow, he said, and the only thing that kept his paralyzing nightmares at bay.

Other items were so precious that the children clung to them even as they rowed. Fiona kept a pot of wormy garden dirt pressed between her knees. Millard had striped his face with a handful of bomb-pulverized brick dust, an odd gesture that seemed part mourning ritual. If what they kept and clung to seemed strange, part of me sympathized: it was all they had left of their home. Just because they knew it was lost didn’t mean they knew how to let it go.

After three hours of rowing like galley slaves, distance had shrunk the island to the size of an open hand. It looked nothing like the foreboding, cliff-ringed fortress I had first laid eyes upon a few weeks ago; now it seemed fragile, a shard of rock in danger of being washed away by the waves.

“Look!” Enoch shouted, standing up in the boat next to ours. “It’s disappearing!” A spectral fog enshrouded the island, blanking it from view, and we broke from rowing to watch it fade.

“Say goodbye to our island,” Emma said, standing and removing her big hat. “We may never see it again.”

“Farewell, island,” said Hugh. “You were so good to us.”

Horace set his oar down and waved. “Goodbye, house. I shall miss all your rooms and gardens, but most of all I shall miss my bed.”

“So long, loop,” Olive sniffled. “Thank you for keeping us safe all these years.”

“Good years,” said Bronwyn. “The best I’ve known.”

I, too, said a silent goodbye, to a place that had changed me forever — and the place that, more than any graveyard, would forever contain the memory, and the mystery, of my grandfather. They were linked inextricably, he and that island, and I wondered, now that both were gone, if I would ever really understand what had happened to me: what I had become; was becoming. I had come to the island to solve my grandfather’s mystery, and in doing so I had discovered my own. Watching Cairnholm disappear felt like watching the only remaining key to that mystery sink beneath the dark waves.

And then the island was simply gone, swallowed up by a mountain of fog.

As if it had never existed.

Before long the fog caught up to us. By increments we were blinded, the mainland dimming and the sun fading to a pale white bloom, and we turned circles in the eddying tide until we’d lost all sense of direction. Finally we stopped and put our oars down and waited in the doldrummy quiet, hoping it would pass; there was no use going any farther until it did.

“I don’t like this,” Bronwyn said. “If we wait too long it’ll be night, and we’ll have worse things to reckon with than bad weather.”

Then, as if the weather had heard Bronwyn and decided to put us in our place, it turned really bad. A strong wind blew up, and within moments our world was transformed. The sea around us whipped into white-capped waves that slapped at our hulls and broke into our boats, sloshing cold water around our feet. Next came rain, hard as little bullets on our skin. Soon we were being tossed around like rubber toys in a bathtub.

“Turn into the waves!” Bronwyn shouted, slicing at the water with her oars. “If they broadside us we’ll flip for sure!” But most of us were too spent to row in calm water, let alone a boiling sea, and the rest were too scared even to reach for the oars, so instead we grabbed for the gunwales and held on for dear life.

A wall of water plowed straight toward us. We climbed the massive wave, our boats turning nearly vertical beneath us. Emma clung to me and I clung to the oarlock; behind us Hugh held on to the seat with his arms. We crested the wave like a roller coaster, my stomach dropping into my legs, and as we raced down the far side, everything in our boat that wasn’t nailed down — Emma’s map, Hugh’s bag, the red roller suitcase I’d lugged with me since Florida — went flying out over our heads and into the water.

There was no time to worry about what had been lost, because initially we couldn’t even see the other boats. When we’d resumed an even keel, we squinted into the maelstrom and screamed our friends’ names. There was a terrible moment of silence before we heard voices call back to us, and Enoch’s boat appeared out of the mist, all four passengers aboard, waving their arms at us.

“Are you all right?” I shouted.

“Over there!” they called back. “Look over there!”

I saw that they weren’t waving hello, but directing our attention to something in the water, some thirty yards away — the hull of an overturned boat.

“That’s Bronwyn and Olive’s boat!” Emma said.

It was upside down, its rusty bottom to the sky. There was no sign of either girl around it.

“We have to get closer!” Hugh shouted, and forgetting our exhaustion we grabbed the oars and paddled toward it, calling their names into the wind.

We rowed through a tide of clothes ejected from split-open suitcases, every swirling dress we passed resembling a drowning girl. My heart hammered in my chest, and though I was soaked and shivering I hardly felt the cold. We met Enoch’s boat at the overturned hull of Bronwyn’s and searched the water together.

“Where are they?” Horace moaned. “Oh, if we’ve lost them …”

“Underneath!” Emma said, pointing at the hull. “Maybe they’re trapped underneath it!”

I pulled one of my oars from its lock and banged it against the overturned hull. “If you’re in there, swim out!” I shouted. “We’ll rescue you!”

For a terrible moment there was no response, and I could feel any hope of recovering them slipping away. But then, from the underside of the overturned boat, there was a knock in reply — and then a fist smashed through the hull, wood chips flying, and we all jumped in surprise.

“It’s Bronwyn!” Emma cried. “They’re alive!”

With a few more strikes Bronwyn was able to knock a person-sized hole in the hull. I extended my oar to her and she grabbed it, and with Hugh and Emma and me all pulling, we managed to drag her through the churning water and into our boat just as hers sank, vanishing beneath the waves. She was panicked, hysterical, shouting with breath she didn’t have to spare. Shouting for Olive, who hadn’t been under the hull with her. She was still missing.

“Olive — got to get Olive,” Bronwyn sputtered once she’d tumbled into the boat. She was shivering, coughing up seawater. She stood up in the pitching boat and pointed into the storm. “There!” she cried. “See it?”

I shielded my eyes from the stinging rain and looked, but all I could see were waves and fog. “I don’t see anything!”

“She’s there!” Bronwyn insisted. “The rope!”

Then I saw what she was pointing at: not a flailing girl in the water but a fat thread of woven hemp trailing up from it, barely visible in all the chaos. A strand of taut brown rope extended up from the water and disappeared into the fog. Olive must’ve been attached to the other end, unseen.

We paddled to the rope and Bronwyn reeled it down, and after a minute Olive appeared from the fog above our heads, one end of the rope knotted around her waist. Her shoes had fallen off when her boat flipped, but Bronwyn had already tied Olive to the anchor line, the other end of which was resting on the seafloor. If not for that, she surely would’ve been lost in the clouds by now.

Olive threw her arms around Bronwyn’s neck and crowed, “You saved me, you saved me!”

They embraced. The sight of them put a lump in my throat.

“We ain’t out of danger yet,” said Bronwyn. “We still got to reach shore before nightfall, or our troubles have only just begun.”

The storm had weakened some and the sea’s violent chop died down, but the idea of rowing another stroke, even in a perfectly calm sea, was unimaginable now. We hadn’t made it even halfway to the mainland and already I was hopelessly exhausted. My hands throbbed. My arms felt heavy as tree trunks. Not only that, but the endless diagonal rocking of the boat was having an undeniable effect on my stomach — and judging from the greenish color of the faces around me, I wasn’t alone.

“We’ll rest awhile,” Emma said, trying to sound encouraging. “We’ll rest and bail out the boats until the fog clears …”

“Fog like this has a mind of its own,” said Enoch. “It can go days without breaking. It’ll be dark in a few hours, and then we’ll have to hope we can last until morning without the wights finding us. We’ll be utterly defenseless.”

“And without water,” said Hugh.

“Or food,” added Millard.

Olive raised both hands in the air and said, “I know where it is!”

“Where what is?” said Emma.

“Land. I saw it when I was up at the end of that rope.” Olive had risen above the fog, she explained, and briefly caught a clear view of the mainland.

“Fat lot of good that does,” grumbled Enoch. “We’ve circled back on ourselves a half-dozen times since you were dangling up there.”

“Then let me up again.”

“Are you certain?” Emma asked her. “It’s dangerous. What if a wind catches you, or the rope snaps?”

Olive’s face went steely. “Reel me up,” she repeated.

“When she gets like this, there’s no arguing,” said Emma. “Fetch the rope, Bronwyn.”

“You’re the bravest little girl I ever knew,” Bronwyn said, then set to working. She pulled the anchor out of the water and up into our boat, and with the extra length of rope it gave us we lashed together our two remaining boats so they couldn’t be separated again, then reeled Olive back up through the fog and into the sky.

There was an odd quiet moment when we were all staring at a rope in the clouds, heads thrown back — waiting for a sign from heaven.

Enoch broke the silence. “Well?” he called, impatient.

“I can see it!” came the reply, Olive’s voice barely a squeak over the white noise of waves. “Straight ahead!”

“Good enough for me!” Bronwyn said, and while the rest of us clutched our stomachs and slumped uselessly in our seats, she clambered into the lead boat and took the oars and began to row, guided only by Olive’s tiny voice, an unseen angel in the sky.

“Left … more left … not that much!”

And like that we slowly made our way toward land, the fog pursuing us always, its long, gray tendrils like the ghostly fingers of some phantom hand, ever trying to draw us back.

As if the island couldn’t quite let us go, either.

CHAPTER II

Our twin hulls ground to a halt in the rocky shallows. We hove up onto shore just as the sun was dimming behind acres of gray clouds, perhaps an hour left until full dark. The beach was a stony spit clogged with low-tide sea wrack, but it was beautiful to me, more beautiful than any champagne-white tourist beach back home. It meant we had made it. What it meant to the others I could hardly imagine; most of them hadn’t been off Cairnholm in a lifetime, and now they gazed around in wonder, bewildered to still be alive and wondering what on earth to do about it.

We staggered from our boats with legs made of rubber. Fiona scooped a handful of slimy pebbles into her mouth and rolled them over her tongue, as if she needed all five senses to convince herself she wasn’t dreaming — which was just how I’d felt about being in Miss Peregrine’s loop, at first. I had never, in all my life, so distrusted my own eyes. Bronwyn groaned and sank to the ground, exhausted beyond words. She was surrounded and fussed over and showered with thanks for all she’d done, but it was awkward; our debt was too great and the words thank you too small, and she tried to wave us away but was so tired she could barely raise her hand. Meanwhile, Emma and the boys reeled Olive down from the clouds.

“You’re positively blue!” Emma exclaimed when Olive appeared through the fog, and she leapt up to pull the little girl into her arms. Olive was soaked and frozen, her teeth chattering. There were no blankets, nor even a stitch of dry clothing to give her, so Emma ran her ever-hot hands around Olive’s body until the worst of her shudders subsided, then sent Fiona and Horace away to gather driftwood for a fire. While waiting for their return, we gathered round the boats to take stock of all we’d lost at sea. It was a grim tally. Nearly everything we’d brought now littered the seafloor.

What we had left were the clothes on our backs, a small amount of food in rusty tins, and Bronwyn’s tank-sized steamer trunk, indestructible and apparently unsinkable — and so absurdly heavy that only Bronwyn herself could ever hope to carry it. We tore open its metal latches, eager to find something useful, or better yet, edible, but all it held was a three-volume collection of stories called Tales of the Peculiar, the pages spongy with seawater, and a fancy bath mat embroidered with the letters ALP, Miss Peregrine’s initials.

“Oh, thank heavens! Someone remembered the bath mat,” Enoch deadpanned. “We are saved.”

Everything else was gone, including both our maps — the small one Emma had used to navigate us across the channel and the massive leather-bound loop atlas that had been Millard’s prized possession, the Map of Days. When Millard realized it was gone he began to hyperventilate. “That was one of only five extant copies!” he moaned. “It was of incalculable value! Not to mention it contained years of my personal notes and annotations!”

“At least we still have the Tales of the Peculiar,” said Claire, wringing seawater from her blonde curls. “I can’t get to sleep at night without hearing one.”

“What good are fairy tales if we can’t even find our way?” Millard asked.

I wondered: Find our way to where? It occurred to me that, in our rush to escape the island, I had only ever heard the children talk about reaching the mainland, but we’d never discussed what to do once we got there — as if the idea of actually surviving the journey in those tiny boats was so far-fetched, so comically optimistic, that planning for it was a waste of time. I looked to Emma for reassurance, as I often did. She gazed darkly down the beach. The stony sand backed up to low dunes swaying with saw grass. Beyond was forest: an impenetrable-looking barrier of green that continued in both directions as far as I could see. Emma with her now-lost map had been aiming for a certain port town, but after the storm hit, just making it to dry land had become our goal. There was no telling how far we’d strayed off course. There were no roads I could see, or signposts, or even footpaths. Only wilderness.

Of course, we didn’t really need a map, or a signpost, or anything else. We needed Miss Peregrine — a whole, healed one — the Miss Peregrine who would know just where to go and how to get us there safely. The one perched before us now, fanning her feathers dry on a boulder, was as broken as her maimed wing, which hooked downward in an alarming V. I could tell it pained the children to see her like this. She was supposed to be their mother, their protector. She’d been queen of their little island world, but now she couldn’t speak, couldn’t loop time, couldn’t even fly. They saw her and winced and looked away.

Miss Peregrine kept her eyes trained on the slate-gray sea. They were hard and black and contained unutterable sorrow.

They seemed to say: I failed you.

Horace and Fiona arced toward us through the rocky sand, the wind poofing Fiona’s wild hair like a storm cloud, Horace bouncing with his hands pressed against the sides of his top hat to keep it secure on his head. Somehow he had kept hold of it throughout our near disaster at sea, but now it was stove in on one side like a bent muffler pipe. Still, he refused to let it go; it was the only thing, he said, that matched his muddy, sopping, finely tailored suit.

Their arms were empty. “There’s no wood anywhere!” Horace said as they reached us.

“Did you look in the woods?” said Emma, pointing at the dark line of trees behind the dunes.

“Too scary,” Horace replied. “We heard an owl.”

“Since when are you afraid of birds?”

Horace shrugged and looked at the sand. Then Fiona elbowed him, and he seemed to remember himself, and said: “We found something else, though.”

“Shelter?” asked Emma.

“A road?” asked Millard.

“A goose to cook for supper?” asked Claire.

“No,” Horace replied. “Balloons.”

There was a brief, puzzled silence.

“What do you mean, balloons?” said Emma.

“Big ones in the sky, with men inside.”

Emma’s face darkened. “Show us.”

We followed them back the way they’d come, curving around a bend in the beach and climbing a small embankment. I wondered how we could have possibly missed something as obvious as hot air balloons, until we crested a hill and I saw them — not the big, colorful teardrop-shaped things you see in wall calendars and motivational posters (“The sky’s the limit!”), but a pair of miniature zeppelins: black egg-shaped sacs of gas with skeletal cages hung below them, each containing a single pilot. The craft were small and flew low, banking back and forth in lazy zigzags, and the noise of the surf had covered the subtle whine of their propellers. Emma herded us into the tall saw grass and we dropped down out of sight.

“They’re submarine hunters,” Enoch said, answering the question before anyone had asked it. Millard might’ve been the authority when it came to maps and books, but Enoch was an expert in all things military. “The best way to spot enemy subs is from the sky,” he explained.

“Then why are they flying so close to the ground?” I asked.

“And why aren’t they farther out to sea?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Do you think they could be looking for … us?” Horace ventured.

“If you mean could they be wights,” said Hugh, “don’t be daft. The wights are with the Germans. They’re on that German sub.”

“The wights are allied with whomever it suits their interests to be allied with,” Millard said. “There’s no reason to think they haven’t infiltrated organizations on both sides of the war.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the strange contraptions in the sky. They looked unnatural, like mechanical insects bloated with tumorous eggs.

“I don’t like the way they’re flying,” Enoch said, calculating behind his sharp eyes. “They’re searching the coastline, not the sea.”

“Searching for what?” asked Bronwyn, but the answer was obvious and frightening and no one wanted to say it aloud.

They were searching for us.

We were all squeezed together in the grass, and I felt Emma’s body tense next to mine. “Run when I say run,” she hissed. “We’ll hide the boats, then ourselves.”

We waited for the balloons to zag away, then tumbled out of the grass, praying we were too far away to be spotted. As we ran I found myself wishing that the fog which had plagued us at sea would return again to hide us. It occurred to me that it had very likely saved us once already; without the fog those balloons would’ve spotted us hours ago, in our boats, when we’d had nowhere to run. And in that way, it was one last thing that the island had done to save its peculiar children.

We dragged our boats across the beach toward a sea cave, its entrance a black fissure in a hill of rocks. Bronwyn had spent her strength completely and could hardly manage to carry herself, much less the boats, so the rest of us struggled to pick up the slack, groaning and straining against hulls that kept trying to bury their noses in the wet sand. Halfway across the beach, Miss Peregrine let out a warning cry, and the two zeppelins bobbed up over the dunes and into our line of sight. We broke into an adrenaline-fueled sprint, flying those boats into the cave like they were on rails, while Miss Peregrine hopped lamely alongside us, her broken wing dragging in the sand.

When we were finally out of sight we dropped the boats and flopped onto their overturned keels, our wheezing breaths echoing in the damp and dripping dark. “Please, please let them not have seen us,” Emma prayed aloud.

“Ah, birds! Our tracks!” Millard yelped, and then he stripped off the overcoat he’d been wearing and scrambled back outside to cover the drag marks our boats had made; from the sky they’d look like arrows pointing right to our hiding place. We could only watch his footsteps trail away. If anyone but Millard had ventured out, they’d have been seen for sure.

A minute later he came back, shivering, caked in sand, a red stain outlining his chest. “They’re getting close now,” he panted. “I did the best I could.”

“You’re bleeding again!” Bronwyn fretted. Millard had been grazed by a bullet during our melee at the lighthouse the previous night, and though his recovery so far was remarkable, it was far from complete. “What have you done with your wound dressing?”

“I threw it away. It was tied in such a complicated manner that I couldn’t remove it quickly. An invisible must always be able to disrobe in an instant, or his power is useless!”

“He’s even more useless dead, you stubborn mule,” said Emma. “Now hold still and don’t bite your tongue. This is going to hurt.” She squeezed two fingers in the palm of her opposite hand, concentrated for a moment, and when she took them out again they glowed, red hot.

Millard balked. “Now then, Emma, I’d rather you didn’t — ”

Emma pressed her fingers to his wounded shoulder. Millard gasped. There was the sound of singeing meat, and a curl of smoke rose up from his skin. In a moment the bleeding stopped.

“I’ll have a scar!” Millard whined.

“Yes? And who’ll see it?”

He sulked and said nothing.

The balloons’ engines grew louder, then louder still, amplified by the cave’s stone walls. I pictured them hovering above the cave, studying our footprints, preparing their assault. Emma leaned her shoulder into mine. The little ones ran to Bronwyn and buried their faces in her lap, and she hugged them. Despite our peculiar powers, we felt utterly powerless: it was all we could do to sit hunched and blinking at one another in the pale half-light, noses running from the cold, hoping our enemies would pass us by.

Finally the engines’ whine began to dwindle, and when we could hear our own voices again, Claire mumbled into Bronwyn’s lap, “Tell us a story, Wyn. I’m scared and I don’t like this at all and I think I’d like to hear a story instead.”

“Yes, would you tell one?” Olive pleaded. “A story from the Tales, please. They’re my favorite.”

The most maternal of the peculiars, Bronwyn was more like a mother to the young ones than even Miss Peregrine. It was Bronwyn who tucked them into bed at night, Bronwyn who read them stories and kissed their foreheads. Her strong arms seemed made to gather them in warm embraces, her broad shoulders to carry them. But this was no time for stories — and she said as much.

“Why, certainly it is!” Enoch said with singsongy sarcasm. “But skip the Tales for once and tell us the story of how Miss Peregrine’s wards found their way to safety without a map or any food and weren’t eaten by hollowgast along the way! I’m ever so keen to hear how that story ends.”

“If only Miss Peregrine could tell us,” Claire sniffled. She disentangled herself from Bronwyn and went to the bird, who’d been watching us from her perch on one of the boats’ overturned keels. “What are we to do, headmistress?” said Claire. “Please turn human again. Please wake up!”

Miss Peregrine cooed and stroked Claire’s hair with her wing. Then Olive joined in, her face streaking with tears: “We need you, Miss Peregrine! We’re lost and in danger and increasingly peckish and we’ve got no home anymore nor any friends but one another and we need you!”

Miss Peregrine’s black eyes shimmered. She turned away, unreachable.

Bronwyn knelt down beside the girls. “She can’t turn back right now, sweetheart. But we’ll get her fixed up, I promise.”

“But how?” Olive demanded. Her question reflected off the stone walls, each echo asking it again.

Emma stood up. “I’ll tell you how,” she said, and all eyes went to her. “We’ll walk.” She said it with such conviction that I got a chill. “We’ll walk and walk until we come to a town.”

“What if there’s no town for fifty kilometers?” said Enoch.

“Then we’ll walk for fifty-one kilometers. But I know we weren’t blown that far off course.”

“And if the wights should spot us from the air?” said Hugh.

“They won’t. We’ll be careful.”

“And if they’re waiting for us in the town?” said Horace.

“We’ll pretend to be normal. We’ll pass.”

“I was never much good at that,” Millard said with a laugh.

“You won’t be seen at all, Mill. You’ll be our advance scout, and our secret procurer of necessary items.”

“I am quite a talented thief,” he said with a touch of pride. “A veritable master of the five-fingered arts.”

“And then?” Enoch muttered sourly. “Maybe we’ll have food in our bellies and a warm place to sleep, but we’ll still be out in the open, exposed, vulnerable, loopless … and Miss Peregrine is … is still …”

“We’ll find a loop somehow,” said Emma. “There are landmarks and signposts for those who know what to look for. And if there aren’t, we’ll find someone like us, a fellow peculiar who can show us where the nearest loop is. And in that loop there will be an ymbryne, and that ymbryne will be able to give Miss Peregrine the help she needs.”

I’d never met anyone with Emma’s brash confidence. Everything about her exuded it: the way she carried herself, with shoulders thrown back; the hard set of her teeth when she made up her mind about something; the way she ended every sentence with a declarative period, never a question mark. It was infectious and I loved it, and I had to fight a sudden urge to kiss her, right there in front of everyone.

Hugh coughed, and bees tumbled out of his mouth to form a question mark that shivered in the air. “How can you be so bloody sure?” he asked.

“Because I am, that’s all.” And she brushed her hands as if that were that.

“You make a nice rousing speech,” said Millard, “and I hate to spoil it, but for all we know, Miss Peregrine is the only ymbryne left uncaptured. Recall what Miss Avocet told us: the wights have been raiding loops and abducting ymbrynes for weeks now. Which means that even if we could find a loop, there’d be no way of knowing whether it still had its ymbryne — or was occupied instead by our enemies. We can’t simply go knocking on loop doors and hoping they aren’t full of wights.”

“Or surrounded by half-starved hollows,” Enoch said.

“We won’t have to hope,” Emma said, then smiled in my direction. “Jacob will tell us.”

My entire body went cold. “Me?”

“You can sense hollows from a distance, can’t you?” said Emma. “In addition to seeing them?”

“When they’re close, it kind of feels like I’m going to puke,” I admitted.

“How close do they have to be?” asked Millard. “If it’s only a few meters, that still puts us within devouring range. We’d need you to sense them from much farther away.”

“I haven’t exactly tested it,” I said. “This is all so new to me.”

I’d only ever been exposed to Dr. Golan’s hollow, Malthus — the creature who’d killed my grandfather, then nearly drowned me in Cairnholm’s bog. How far away had he been when I’d first felt him stalking me, lurking outside my house in Englewood? It was impossible to know.

“Regardless, your talent can be developed,” said Millard. “Peculiarities are a bit like muscles — the more you exercise them, the bigger they grow.”

“This is madness!” Enoch said. “Are you all really so desperate that you’d stake everything on him? Why, he’s just a boy — a soft-bellied normal who knows next to nothing of our world!”

“He isn’t normal,” Emma said, grimacing as if this were the direst insult. “He’s one of us!”

“Stuff and rubbish!” yelled Enoch. “Just because there’s a dash of peculiar blood in his veins doesn’t make him my brother. And it certainly doesn’t make him my protector! We don’t know what he’s capable of — he probably wouldn’t know the difference between a hollow at fifty meters and gas pains!”

“He killed one of them, didn’t he?” said Bronwyn. “Stabbed it through the eyes with a pair of sheep shears! When’s the last time you heard of a peculiar so young doing anything like that?”

“Not since Abe,” Hugh said, and at the mention of his name a reverent hush fell over the children.

“I heard he once killed one with his bare hands,” said Bronwyn.

“I heard he killed one with a knitting needle and a length of twine,” said Horace. “In fact, I dreamed it, so I’m certain he did.”

“Half of those stories are just tall tales, and they get taller with every year that passes,” said Enoch. “The Abraham Portman I knew never did a single thing to help us.”

“He was a great peculiar!” said Bronwyn. “He fought bravely and killed scores of hollows for our cause!”

“And then he ran off and left us to hide in that house like refugees while he galavanted around America, playing hero!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emma said, flushing with anger. “There was a lot more to it than that.”

Enoch shrugged. “Anyway, that’s all beside the point,” he said. “Whatever you thought of Abe, this boy isn’t him.”

In that moment I hated Enoch, and yet I couldn’t blame him for his doubts about me. How could the others, so sure and seasoned in their abilities, put so much faith in mine — in something I was only beginning to understand and had known I was capable of for only a few days? Whose grandson I was seemed irrelevant. I simply didn’t know what I was doing.

“You’re right, I’m not my grandfather,” I said. “I’m just a kid from Florida. I probably got lucky when I killed that hollow.”

“Nonsense,” said Emma. “You’ll be every bit the hollow-slayer Abe was, one day.”

“One day soon, let’s hope,” said Hugh.

“It’s your destiny,” said Horace, and the way he said it made me think he knew something I didn’t.

“And even if it ain’t,” said Hugh, clapping his hand on my back, “you’re all we’ve got, mate.”

“If that’s true, bird help us all,” said Enoch.

My head was spinning. The weight of their expectations threatened to crush me. I stood, unsteady, and moved toward the cave exit. “I need some air,” I said, pushing past Enoch.

“Jacob, wait!” cried Emma. “The balloons!”

But they were long gone.

“Let him go,” Enoch grumbled. “If we’re lucky, he’ll swim back to America.”

Walking down to the water’s edge, I tried to picture myself the way my new friends saw me, or wanted to: not as Jacob, the kid who once broke his ankle running after an ice cream truck, or who reluctantly and at the behest of his dad tried and failed three times to get onto his school’s noncompetitive track team, but as Jacob, inspector of shadows, miraculous interpreter of squirmy gut feelings, seer and slayer of real and actual monsters — and all that might stand between life and death for our merry band of peculiars.

How could I ever live up to my grandfather’s legacy?

I climbed a stack of rocks at the water’s edge and stood there, hoping the steady breeze would dry my damp clothes, and in the dying light I watched the sea, a canvas of shifting grays, melded and darkening. In the distance a light glinted every so often. It was Cairnholm’s lighthouse, flashing its hello and last goodbye.

My mind drifted. I lapsed into a waking dream.

I see a man. He is of middle age, cloaked in excremental mud, crabbing slowly along the knife tip of a cliff, his thin hair uncombed and hanging wet across his face. Wind whips his thin jacket like a sail. He stops, drops to his elbows. Slips them into divots he’d made weeks before, when he was scouting these coves for mating terns and shearwaters’ nests. He raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes but aims them low, below the nests, at a thin crescent of beach where the swelling tide collects things and heaves them up: driftwood and seaweed, shards of smashed boats — and sometimes, the locals say, bodies.

The man is my father. He is looking for something that he desperately does not want to find.

He is looking for the body of his son.

I felt a touch on my shoe and opened my eyes, startled out of my half-dream. It was nearly dark, and I was sitting on the rocks with my knees drawn into my chest, and suddenly there was Emma, breeze tossing her hair, standing on the sand below me.

“How are you?” she asked.

It was a question that would’ve required some college-level math and about an hour of discussion to answer. I felt a hundred conflicting things, the great bulk of which canceled out to equal cold and tired and not particularly interested in talking. So I said, “I’m fine, just trying to dry off,” and flapped the front of my soggy sweater to demonstrate.

“I can help you with that.” She clambered up the stack of rocks and sat next to me. “Gimme an arm.”

I offered one up and Emma laid it across her knees. Cupping her hands over her mouth, she bent her head toward my wrist. Then, taking a deep breath, she exhaled slowly through her palms and an incredible, soothing heat bloomed along my forearm, just on the edge of painful.

“Is it too much?” she said.

I tensed, a shudder going through me, and shook my head.

“Good.” She moved farther up my arm to exhale again. Another pulse of sweet warmth. Between breaths, she said, “I hope you’re not letting what Enoch said bother you. The rest of us believe in you, Jacob. Enoch can be a wrinkle-hearted old titmouse, especially when he’s feeling jealous.”

“I think he’s right,” I said.

“You don’t really. Do you?”

It all came pouring out. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” I said. “How can any of you depend on me? If I’m really peculiar then it’s just a little bit, I think. Like I’m a quarter peculiar and the rest of you guys are full-blooded.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she said, laughing.

“But my grandfather was more peculiar than me. He had to be. He was so strong …”

“No, Jacob,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “It’s astounding. In so many ways, you’re just like him. You’re different, too, of course — you’re gentler and sweeter — but everything you’re saying … you sound like Abe, when he first came to stay with us.”

“I do?”

“Yes. He was confused, too. He’d never met another peculiar. He didn’t understand his power or how it worked or what he was capable of. Neither did we, to tell the truth. It’s very rare, what you can do. Very rare. But your grandfather learned.”

“How?” I asked. “Where?”

“In the war. He was part of a secret all-peculiar cell of the British army. Fought hollowgast and Germans at the same time. The sorts of things they did you don’t win medals for — but they were heroes to us, and none more than your grandfather. The sacrifices they made set the corrupted back decades and saved the lives of countless peculiars.”

And yet, I thought, he couldn’t save his own parents. How strangely tragic.

“And I can tell you this,” Emma went on. “You’re every bit as peculiar as he was — and as brave, too.”

“Ha. Now you’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“No,” she said, looking me in the eye. “I’m not. You’ll learn, Jacob. One day you’ll be an even greater hollow-slayer than he was.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone keeps saying. How can you be so sure?”

“It’s something I feel very deeply,” she said. “You’re supposed to, I think. Just like you were supposed to come to Cairnholm.”

“I don’t believe in stuff like that. Fate. The stars. Destiny.”

“I didn’t say destiny.”

“Supposed to is the same thing,” I said. “Destiny is for people in books about magical swords. It’s a lot of crap. I’m here because my grandfather mumbled something about your island in the ten seconds before he died — and that’s it. It was an accident. I’m glad he did, but he was delirious. He could just as easily have rattled off a grocery list.”

“But he didn’t,” she said.

I sighed, exasperated. “And if we go off in search of loops, and you depend on me to save you from monsters and instead I get you all killed, is that destiny, too?”

She frowned, put my arm back in my lap. “I didn’t say destiny,” she said again. “What I believe is that when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You’re here for a reason — and it’s not to fail and die.”

I didn’t have the heart to keep arguing. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t think you’re right — but I do hope you are.” I felt bad for snapping at her before, but I’d been cold and scared and feeling defensive. I had good moments and bad, terrified thoughts and confident ones — though my terror-to-confidence ratio was pretty dismal at present, like three-to-one, and in the terrified moments it felt like I was being pushed into a role I hadn’t asked for; volunteered for front-line duty in a war, the full scope of which none of us yet knew. “Destiny” sounded like an obligation, and if I was to be thrust into battle against a legion of nightmare creatures, that had to be my choice.

Though in a sense the choice had been made already, when I agreed to sail into the unknown with these peculiar children. And it wasn’t true, if I really searched the dusty corners of myself, that I hadn’t asked for this. Really, I’d been dreaming of such adventures since I was small. Back then I’d believed in destiny, and believed in it absolutely, with every strand and fiber of my little kid heart. I’d felt it like an itch in my chest while listening to my grandfather’s extraordinary stories. One day that will be me. What felt like obligation now had been a promise back then — that one day I would escape my little town and live an extraordinary life, as he had done; and that one day, like Grandpa Portman, I would do something that mattered. He used to say to me: “You’re going to be a great man, Yakob. A very great man.”

“Like you?” I would ask him.

“Better,” he’d reply.

I’d believed him then, and I still wanted to. But the more I learned about him, the longer his shadow became, and the more impossible it seemed that I could ever matter the way he had. That maybe it would be suicidal even to try. And when I imagined myself trying, thoughts of my father crept in — my poor about-to-be-devastated father — and before I could push them out of my mind, I wondered how a great man could do something so terrible to someone who loved him.

I began to shiver. “You’re cold,” Emma said. “Let me finish what I started.” She picked up my other arm and kissed with her breath the whole length of it. It was almost more than I could handle. When she reached my shoulder, instead of placing the arm in my lap, she hung it around her neck. I lifted my other arm to join it, and she put her arms around me, too, and our foreheads nodded together.

Speaking very quietly, Emma said, “I hope you don’t regret the choice you made. I’m so glad you’re here with us. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I fear I wouldn’t be all right at all.”

I thought about going back. For a moment I really tried to play it out in my head, how it would be if I could somehow row one of our boats back to the island again, and go back home.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t imagine.

I whispered: “How could I?”

“When Miss Peregrine turns human again, she’ll be able to send you back. If you want to go.”

My question hadn’t been about logistics. I had meant, simply: How could I leave you? But those words were unsayable, couldn’t find their way past my lips. So I held them inside, and instead I kissed her.

This time it was Emma whose breath caught short. Her hands rose to my cheeks but stopped just shy of making contact. Heat radiated from them in waves.

“Touch me,” I said.

“I don’t want to burn you,” she said, but a sudden shower of sparks inside my chest said I don’t care, so I took her fingers and raked them along my cheek, and both of us gasped. It was hot but I didn’t pull away. Dared not, for fear she’d stop touching me. And then our lips met again and we were kissing again, and her extraordinary warmth surged through me.

My eyes fell closed. The world faded away.

If my body was cold in the night mist, I didn’t feel it. If the sea roared in my ears, I didn’t hear it. If the rock I sat on was sharp and jagged, I hardly noticed. Everything outside the two of us was a distraction.

And then a great crash echoed in the dark, but I thought nothing of it — could not take myself away from Emma — until the sound doubled and was joined by an awful shriek of metal, and a blinding light swept over us, and finally I couldn’t shut it out anymore.

The lighthouse, I thought. The lighthouse is falling into the sea. But the lighthouse was a pinpoint in the distance, not a sun-bright flash, and its light only traveled in one direction, not back and forth, searching.

It wasn’t a lighthouse at all. It was a searchlight — and it was coming from the water close to shore.

It was the searchlight of a submarine.

Brief second of terror in which brain and legs were disconnected. My eyes and ears registered the submarine not far from shore: metal beast rising from the sea, water rushing from its sides, men bursting onto its deck from open hatches, shouting, training cannons of light at us. And then the stimulus reached my legs and we slid, fell, and pitched ourselves down from the rocks and ran like hell.

The spotlight threw our pistoning shadows across the beach, ten feet tall and freakish. Bullets pocked the sand and buzzed the air.

A voice boomed from a loudspeaker. “STOP! DO NOT RUN!”

We burst into the cave — They’re coming, they’re here, get up, get up — but the children had heard the commotion and were already on their feet — all but Bronwyn, who had so exhausted herself at sea that she had fallen asleep against the cave wall and couldn’t be roused. We shook her and shouted in her face, but she only moaned and brushed us away with a sweep of her arm. Finally we had to hoist her up by the waist, which was like lifting a tower of bricks, but once her feet touched the ground, her red-rimmed eyelids split open and she took her own weight.

We grabbed up our things, thankful now that they were so small and so few. Emma scooped Miss Peregrine into her arms. We tore outside. As we ran into the dunes, I saw behind us a gang of silhouetted men splashing the last few feet to shore. In their hands, held above their heads to keep them dry, were guns.

We sprinted through a stand of windblown trees and into the trackless forest. Darkness enveloped us. What moon wasn’t already hidden behind clouds was blotted out now by trees, branches filtering its pale light to nil. There was no time for our eyes to adjust or to feel our way carefully or to do anything other than run in a gasping, stumbling herd with arms outstretched, dodging trunks that seemed to coalesce suddenly in the air just inches from us.

After a few minutes we stopped, chests heaving, to listen. The voices were still behind us, only now they were joined by another sound: dogs barking.

We ran on.

CHAPTER III

We tumbled through the black woods for what seemed like hours, no moon or movement of stars by which to judge the passing time. The sound of men shouting and dogs barking wheeled around us as we ran, menacing us from everywhere and nowhere. To throw the dogs off our scent, we waded into an icy stream and followed it until our feet went numb, and when we crossed out of it again, it felt like I was stumbling along on prickling stumps.

After a time we began to fail. Someone moaned in the dark. Olive and Claire started to fall behind, so Bronwyn hefted them into her arms, but then she couldn’t keep up, either. Finally, when Horace tripped over a root and fell to the ground and then lay there begging for a rest, we all stopped. “Up, you lazy sod!” Enoch hissed at him, but he was wheezing, too, and then he leaned against a tree to catch his breath and the fight seemed to go out of him.

We were reaching the limit of our endurance. We had to stop.

“It’s no use running circles in the dark like this, anyway,” said Emma. “We could just as easily end up right back where we started.”

“We’ll be able to make better sense of this forest in the light of day,” said Millard.

“Provided we live that long,” said Enoch.

A light rain hissed down. Fiona made a shelter for us by coaxing a ring of trees to bend their lower branches together, petting their bark and whispering to their trunks until the branches meshed to form a watertight roof of leaves just high enough for us to sit beneath. We crawled in and lay listening to the rain and the distant barking of dogs. Somewhere in the forest, men with guns were still hunting us. Alone with our thoughts, I’m sure each of us was wondering the same thing — what might happen to us if we were caught.

Claire began to cry, softly at first but then louder and louder, until both of her mouths were bawling and she could hardly catch a breath between sobs.

“Get ahold of yourself!” Enoch said. “They’ll hear you — and then we’ll all have something to cry about!”

“They’re going to feed us to their dogs!” she said. “They’re going to shoot holes in us and take Miss Peregrine away!”

Bronwyn scooted next to her and wrapped the little girl in a bear hug. “Please, Claire! You’ve got to think about something else!”

“I’m truh-trying!” she wailed.

“Try harder!”

Claire squeezed her eyes shut, drew in a deep breath, and held it until she looked like a balloon about to pop — then burst into a fit of gasping cough-sobs that were louder than ever.

Enoch clapped his hands over her mouths. “Shhhhhhh!”

“I’m suh-suh-sorry!” she blubbered. “Muh-maybe if I could hear a story … one of the tuh-Tales …”

“Not this again,” said Millard. “I’m beginning to wish we’d lost those damned books at sea with the rest of our things!”

Miss Peregrine spoke up — inasmuch as she was able to — hopping atop Bronwyn’s trunk and tapping it with her beak. Inside, along with the rest of our meager possessions, were the Tales.

“I’m with Miss P,” said Enoch. “It’s worth a try — anything to stop her bawling!”

“All right then, little one,” Bronwyn said, “but just one tale, and you’ve got to promise to stop crying!”

“I pruh-promise,” Claire sniffled.

Bronwyn opened the trunk and pulled out a waterlogged volume of Tales of the Peculiar. Emma scooted close and lit the tiniest wisp of flame on her fingertip to read by. Then Miss Peregrine, apparently impatient to pacify Claire, took one edge of the book’s cover in her beak and opened it to a seemingly random chapter. In a hushed voice, Bronwyn began to read.

“Once upon a peculiar time, in a forest deep and ancient, there roamed a great many animals. There were rabbits and deer and foxes, just as there are in every forest, but there were animals of a less common sort, too, like stilt-legged grimbears and two-headed lynxes and talking emu-raffes. These peculiar animals were a favorite target of hunters, who loved to shoot them and mount them on walls and show them off to their hunter friends, but loved even more to sell them to zookeepers, who would lock them in cages and charge money to view them. Now, you might think it would be far better to be locked in a cage than to be shot and mounted upon a wall, but peculiar creatures must roam free to be happy, and after a while the spirits of caged ones wither, and they begin to envy their wall-mounted friends.”

“This is a sad story,” Claire groused. “Tell a different one.”

“I like it,” said Enoch. “Tell more about the shooting and mounting.”

Bronwyn ignored them both. “Now this was an age when giants still roamed the Earth,” she went on, “as they did in the long-ago Aldinn times, though they were few in number and diminishing. And it just so happened that one of these giants lived near the forest, and he was very kind and spoke very softly and ate only plants and his name was Cuthbert. One day Cuthbert came into the forest to gather berries, and there saw a hunter hunting an emu-raffe. Being the kindly giant that he was, Cuthbert picked up the little ’raffe by the scruff of its long neck, and by standing up to his full height, on tiptoe, which he rarely did because it made all his old bones crackle, Cuthbert was able to reach up very high and deposit the emu-raffe on a mountaintop, well out of danger. Then, just for good measure, he squashed the hunter to jelly between his toes.

“Word of Cuthbert’s kindness spread throughout the forest, and soon peculiar animals were coming to him every day, asking to be lifted up to the mountaintop and out of danger. And Cuthbert said, ‘I’ll protect you, little brothers and sisters. All I ask in return is that you talk to me and keep me company. There aren’t many giants left in the world, and I get lonely from time to time.’

“And they said, ‘Of course, Cuthbert, we will.’

“So every day Cuthbert saved more peculiar animals from the hunters, lifting them up to the mountain by the scruffs of their necks, until there was a whole peculiar menagerie up there. And the animals were happy there because they could finally live in peace, and Cuthbert was happy, too, because if he stood on his tiptoes and rested his chin on the top of the mountain he could talk to his new friends all he liked. Then one morning a witch came to see Cuthbert. He was bathing in a little lake in the shadow of the mountain when she said to him, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got to turn you into stone now.’

“ ‘Why would you do something like that?’ asked the giant. ‘I’m very kindly. A helping sort of giant.’

“And she said, ‘I was hired by the family of the hunter you squashed.’

“ ‘Ah,’ he replied. ‘Forgot about him.’

“ ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the witch said again, and then she waved a birch branch at him and poor Cuthbert turned to stone.

“All of the sudden Cuthbert became very heavy — so heavy that he began to sink into the lake. He sank and sank and didn’t stop sinking until he was covered in water all the way up to his neck. His animal friends saw what was happening, and though they felt terrible about it, they decided they could do nothing to help him.

“ ‘I know you can’t save me,’ Cuthbert shouted up to his friends, ‘but at least come and talk to me! I’m stuck down here, and so very lonely!’

“ ‘But if we come down there the hunters will shoot us!’ they called back.

“Cuthbert knew they were right, but still he pleaded with them.

“ ‘Talk to me!’ he cried. ‘Please come and talk to me!’

“The animals tried singing and shouting to poor Cuthbert from the safety of their mountaintop, but they were too distant and their voices too small, so that even to Cuthbert and his giant ears they sounded quieter than the whisper of leaves in the wind.

“ ‘Talk to me!’ he begged. ‘Come and talk to me!’

“But they never did. And he was still crying when his throat turned to stone like the rest of him. The end.”

Bronwyn closed the book.

Claire looked appalled. “That’s it?”

Enoch began to laugh.

“That’s it,” Bronwyn said.

“That’s a terrible story,” said Claire. “Tell another one!”

“A story’s a story,” said Emma, “and now it’s time for bed.”

Claire pouted, but she had stopped crying, so the tale had served its purpose.

“Tomorrow’s not likely to be any easier than today was,” said Millard. “We’ll need what rest we can get.”

We gathered cuts of springy moss to use as pillows, Emma drying the rain from them with her hands before we tucked them under our heads. Lacking blankets, we nestled together for warmth: Bronwyn cuddling the small ones; Fiona entangled with Hugh, whose bees came and went from his open mouth as he snored, keeping watch over their sleeping master; Horace and Enoch shivering with their backs to one another, too proud to snuggle; myself with Emma. I lay on my back and she in the crook of my arm, head on my chest, her face so invitingly close to mine that I could kiss her forehead anytime I liked — and I wouldn’t have stopped except that I was as tired as a dead man and she was as warm as an electric blanket and pretty soon I was asleep and dreaming pleasant, forgettable nothings.

I never remember nice dreams; only the bad ones stick.

It was a miracle that I could sleep at all, given the circumstances. Even here — running for our lives, sleeping exposed, facing death — even here, in her arms, I was able to find some measure of peace.

Watching over us all, her black eyes shining in the dark, was Miss Peregrine. Though damaged and diminished, she was still our protector.

The night turned raw, and Claire began to shake and cough. Bronwyn nudged Emma awake and said, “Miss Bloom, the little one needs you; I’m afraid she’s taking ill,” and with a whispered apology Emma slipped out of my arms to go and attend to Claire. I felt a twinge of jealousy, then guilt for being jealous of a sick friend. So I lay alone feeling irrationally forsaken and stared into the dark, more exhausted than I had ever been and yet unable now to sleep, listening to the others shift and moan in the grip of nightmares that could not have equalled the one we would likely wake to. And eventually the dark peeled back layer by layer, and with imperceptible gradations the sky feathered to a delicate pale blue.

At dawn we crawled from our shelter. I picked moss out of my hair and tried in vain to brush the mud from my pants, but succeeded only in smearing it, making me look like some bog creature vomited from the earth. I was hungry in a way I’d never experienced, my belly gnawing at itself from the inside, and I ached just about everywhere it was possible to ache, from rowing and running and sleeping on the ground. Still, a few mercies prevailed: overnight the rain had let up, the day was warming by degrees, and we seemed to have evaded the wights and their dogs, at least for the time being; either they’d stopped barking or were too far away to be heard.

In doing so we’d gotten ourselves hopelessly lost. The forest was no easier to navigate by day than it had been in the dark. Green-boughed firs stretched away in endless, disordered rows, each direction a mirror of the others. The ground here was a carpet of fallen leaves that hid any tracks we might’ve made the night before. We’d woken in the heart of a green labyrinth without a map or compass, and Miss Peregrine’s broken wing meant she couldn’t fly above the treeline to guide us. Enoch suggested we raise Olive above the trees, like we had in the fog, but we didn’t have any rope to hold her, and if she slipped and fell into the sky, we’d never get her back again.

Claire was sick and getting sicker, and lay curled in Bronwyn’s lap, sweat beading her forehead despite a chill in the air. She was so skinny I could count her ribs through her dress.

“Will she be all right?” I asked.

“She’s feverish,” Bronwyn said, pressing a hand to the girl’s cheek. “She needs medicine.”

“First we’ll have to find our way out of this accursed forest,” said Millard.

“First we should eat,” said Enoch. “Let’s eat and discuss our options.”

“What options?” said Emma. “Pick a direction and we’ll walk in it. Any one’s as good as another.”

In sullen silence we sat and ate. I’ve never tasted dog food but I’m sure this was worse — brownish squares of congealed meat fat from rusted tins, which, lacking utensils, we dug out with our fingers.

“I packed five salted game hens and three tins of foie gras with cornichons,” Horace said bitterly, “and this is what survives our shipwreck.” He held his nose and dropped a gelatinous nugget down his throat without chewing. “I think we’re being punished.”

“For what?” said Emma. “We’ve been perfect angels. Well, most of us.”

“The sins of past lives, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Peculiars don’t have past lives,” said Millard. “We live them all at once.”

We finished quickly, buried our empty tins, and prepared to go. Just as we were about to, Hugh burst through a thicket of bushes into our makeshift camp, bees circling his head in an agitated cloud. He was out of breath with excitement.

“Where have you been?” Enoch demanded.

“I needed some privacy to attend to my morning never-you-minds,” Hugh said, “and I found — ”

“Who gave you permission to be out of visual range?” Enoch said. “We nearly left without you!”

“Who says I need permission? Anyway, I saw — ”

“You can’t just wander away like that! What if you’d gotten lost?”

“We’re already lost.”

“You ignoramus! What if you couldn’t find your way back?”

“I left a trail of bees, like I always do — ”

“Would you kindly let him finish!” Emma shouted.

“Thank you,” said Hugh, and then he turned and pointed back the way he’d come. “I saw water. Quite a lot of it, through the trees there.”

Emma’s face clouded. She said, “We’re trying to get away from the sea, not back to it. We must’ve doubled back on ourselves in the night.”

We followed Hugh back the way he’d come, Bronwyn carrying Miss Peregrine on her shoulder and poor sick Claire in her arms. After a hundred yards, a glisten of gray ripples appeared beyond the trees: some wide body of water.

“Oh, this is just awful,” said Horace. “They’ve chased us right back into their arms!”

“I don’t hear any soldiers,” said Emma. “In fact, I don’t hear anything at all. Not even the ocean.”

Enoch said, “That’s because it’s not the ocean, you dolt,” and he stood up and ran toward the water. When we caught up with him he was standing with his feet planted in wet sand, looking back at us with a self-satisfied I-told-you-so grin. He’d been right: this wasn’t the sea. It was a misty, gray lake, wide and ringed with firs, its calm surface smooth as slate. But its most distinguishing feature was something I didn’t notice right away; not until Claire pointed out a large rock formation jutting from the shallows nearby. My eyes skimmed it at first but then went back for a second glance. There was something eerie about it — and decidedly familiar.

“It’s the giant from the story!” said Claire, pointing from her place in Bronwyn’s arms. “It’s Cuthbert!”

Bronwyn stroked her head. “Shh, honey, you’ve got fever.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Enoch. “It’s just a rock.”

But it wasn’t. Though wind and rain had worn its features some, it looked just like a giant who’d sunk up to its neck in the lake. You could see clearly that it had a head and a neck and a nose and even an Adam’s apple, and some scrubby trees were growing atop it like a crown of wild hair. But what was really uncanny was the position of its head — thrown back with its mouth open, as if, like the giant in the story we’d heard just last night, it had turned to stone while crying out to its friends on the mountaintop.

“And look!” said Olive, pointing at a rocky bluff rising in the distance. “That must be Cuthbert’s mountain!”

“Giants are real,” Claire murmured, her voice weak but full of wonder. “And so are the Tales!”

“Let’s not jump to absurd conclusions,” said Enoch. “What’s more likely? That the writer of the tale we read last night was inspired by a rock that just happened to be shaped like a giant head, or that this head-shaped rock was really a giant?”

“You take the fun out of everything,” said Olive. “I believe in giants, even if you don’t!”

“The Tales are just tales and nothing more,” Enoch grumbled.

“Funny,” I said, “that’s exactly what I thought all of you were, before I met you.”

Olive laughed. “Jacob, you’re silly. You really thought we were made up?”

“Of course. And even after I met you I still did, for a while. Like maybe I was losing my mind.”

“Real or not, it’s an incredible coincidence,” said Millard. “To have been reading that story just last night, and then happen upon the very bit of geography that inspired it the next morning? What are the chances?”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Emma said. “Miss Peregrine opened the book herself, remember? She must’ve chosen that story on purpose.”

Bronwyn turned to look at the bird on her shoulder and said, “Is that right, Miss P? Why?”

“Because it means something,” said Emma.

“Absolutely,” said Enoch. “It means we should go and climb that bluff. Then maybe we’ll see a way out of this forest!”

“I mean the tale means something,” said Emma. “In the story, what was it the giant wanted? That he asked for over and over again?”

“Someone to talk to!” Olive answered like an eager student.

“Exactly,” said Emma. “So if he wants to talk, let’s hear what he has to say.” And with that, she waded into the lake.

We watched her go, slightly perplexed.

“Where’s she heading?” said Millard. He seemed to be asking me. I shook my head.

“We’ve got wights chasing us!” Enoch shouted after her. “We’re desperately lost! What on bird’s green earth are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking peculiarly!” Emma shouted back. She sloshed through the shallows to the base of the rock, then climbed up to its jaw and peered into its open mouth.

“Well?” I called. “What do you see?”

“Don’t know!” she replied. “Looks like it goes down a long way, though. I’d better get a closer look!”

Emma hoisted herself into the giant’s stone mouth.

“You’d better come down from there before you get hurt!” shouted Horace. “You’re making everyone anxious!”

“Everything makes you anxious,” Hugh said.

Emma tossed a rock down the giant’s throat, listening for whatever sound came back. She started to say “I think it might be a …” but then slipped on loose gravel, and her last word was lost as she scrambled and caught herself before she could fall.

“Be careful!” I shouted, my heart racing. “Wait, I’m coming, too!”

I splashed into the lake after her.

“It might be a what?” called Enoch.

“Only one way to find out!” Emma said excitedly, and climbed farther into the giant’s mouth.

“Oh, Lord,” said Horace. “There she goes …”

“Wait!” I shouted again — but she was gone already, disappeared down the giant’s throat.

The giant appeared even larger up close than it had from the shore, and peering down into its dark throat, I swore I could almost hear old Cuthbert breathing. I cupped my hands and called Emma’s name. My own voice came echoing back. The others were wading into the lake now, too, but I couldn’t wait for them — what if she was in trouble down there? — so I gritted my teeth, lowered my legs into the dark, and let go.

I fell for a long time. A full second. Then splash — a plunge into water so cold it made me gasp, all my muscles constricting at once. I had to remind myself to tread water or sink. I was in a dim, narrow chamber filled with water, with no way back up the giant’s long, smooth throat; no rope, no ladder, no footholds. I shouted for Emma, but she was nowhere around.

Oh God, I thought. She’s drowned!

But then something tickled my arms, and bubbles began breaking all around me, and a moment later Emma broke the surface, gasping for breath.

She looked okay by the pale light. “What are you waiting for?” she said slapping the water with her hand like she wanted me to dive down with her. “Come on!”

“Are you insane?” I said. “We’re trapped in here!”

“Of course we’re not!” she said.

Bronwyn’s voice called from above. “Hellooooo, I hear you down there! What have you found?”

“I think it’s a loop entrance!” Emma called back. “Tell everyone to jump in and don’t be afraid — Jacob and I will meet you on the other side!”

And then she took my hand, and though I didn’t quite understand what was going on, I drew a deep breath and let her pull me underwater. We flipped and scissor-kicked downward toward a person-sized hole in the rock through which a gleam of daylight was visible. She pushed me inside and then came after, and we swam through a shaft about ten feet long and then out into the lake. Above us I could see its rippling surface, and above that the blue, refracted sky, and as we rose toward it the water warmed dramatically. Then we broke into the air and gasped for breath, and instantly I could feel that the weather had changed: it was hot and muggy now, and the light had changed to that of a golden afternoon. The depth of the lake had changed, too — now it came all the way to the giant’s chin.

“See?” Emma said, grinning. “We’re somewhen else!”

And just like that, we’d entered a loop — abandoned a mild morning in 1940 for a hot afternoon in some other, older year, though it was difficult to tell just how much older, here in the forest, away from the easily datable cues of civilization.

One by one, the other children surfaced around us, and seeing how much things had changed, had their own realizations.

“Do you realize what this means?” Millard squealed. He was splashing around, turning in circles, out of breath with excitement. “It means there’s secret knowledge embedded in the Tales!”

“Not so useless now, are they?” said Olive.

“Oh, I can’t wait to analyze and annotate them,” said Millard, rubbing his hands together.

“Don’t you dare write in my book, Millard Nullings!” said Bronwyn.

“But what is this loop?” asked Hugh. “Who do you think lives here?”

Olive said, “Cuthbert’s animal friends, of course!”

Enoch rolled his eyes but stopped short of saying what he was probably thinking — It’s just a story! — maybe because his mind was starting to change, too.

“Every loop has an ymbryne,” said Emma, “even mystery loops from storybook tales. So let’s go and find her.”

“All right,” said Millard. “Where?”

“The only place the story made mention of aside from this lake was that mountain,” Emma said, indicating the bluff beyond the trees. “Who’s ready to do some climbing?”

We were tired and hungry, every one of us, but finding the loop had given us a burst of new energy. We left the stone giant behind and set off through the woods toward the foot of the bluff, our clothes drip-drying quickly in the heat. As we neared the bluff, the ground began to slope upward, and then a well-worn path appeared and we followed it up and up through clusters of brushy firs and winding rocky passages, until the path became so vertical in places that we had to go on all fours, clawing at the angled ground to pull ourselves forward.

“There’d better be something wonderful at the end of this trail,” said Horace, dabbing sweat from his forehead. “A gentleman doesn’t perspire!”

The path narrowed to a ribbon, the ground rising sharply on our right side and dropping away on the left, a carpet of green treetops spreading beyond it. “Hug the wall!” Emma warned. “It’s a long way down.”

Just glancing at the drop-off made me dizzy. Suddenly, it seemed, I had developed a new and stomach-clenching fear of heights, and it took all my concentration simply to put one foot in front of the other.

Emma touched my arm. “Are you all right?” she whispered. “You look pale.”

I lied and said I was, and succeeded in faking allrightness for exactly three more twists in the path, at which point my heart was racing and my legs shaking so badly that I had to sit down, right there in the middle of the narrow path, blocking everyone behind me.

“Oh, dear,” Hugh muttered. “Jacob’s cracking up.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I muttered. I’d never been afraid of heights before, but now I couldn’t so much as look off the edge of the path without my stomach doing flips.

Then something terrible occurred to me: what if this wasn’t a fear of heights I was feeling — but of hollows?

It couldn’t be, though: we were inside a loop, where hollows couldn’t go. And yet the more I studied the feeling churning in my gut, the more convinced I became that it wasn’t the drop itself that bothered me, but something beyond it.

I had to see for myself.

Everyone chattered anxiously in my ear, asking what was the matter, was I okay. I shut out their voices, tipped forward onto my hands, and crawled toward the edge of path. The closer I got, the worse my stomach felt, like it was being clawed to shreds from the inside. Inches away, I pressed my chest flat to the ground and reached out to hook my fingers over the ledge, then dragged myself forward until I could peek over it.

It took my eyes a moment to spot the hollow. At first it was just a shimmer against the craggy mountainside; a quivering spot in the air like heat waves rising from a hot car. An error, barely detectable.

This was how they looked to normals, and to other peculiars — to anyone who could not do what I did.

Then I actually experienced my peculiar ability coming to life. Very quickly, the churning in my belly contracted and focused into a single point of pain; and then, in a way I can’t fully explain, it became directional, lengthening from a point into a line, from one dimension to two. The line, like a compass needle, pointed diagonally at that faltering spot a hundred yards below and to the left on the mountainside, the waves and shimmers of which began to gather and coalesce into solid black mass, a humanoid thing made from tentacles and shadow, clinging to the rocks.

And then it saw me see it and its whole awful body drew taut. Hunkering close against the rocks, it unhinged its saw-toothed mouth and let loose an ear-splitting shriek.

My friends didn’t need me to describe what I was seeing. The sound alone was enough.

“Hollow!” someone shouted.

“Run!” shouted another, belaboring the obvious.

I scrambled back from the ledge and was pulled to my feet, and then we were all running in a pack, not down the mountain but up it, farther into the unknown rather than back toward the flat ground and loop exit that lay behind us. But it was too late to turn back; I could feel the hollow leaping from boulder to crag up the cliffside — but away from us, down the path, to cut us off in case we tried to run past it down the mountain. It was trapping us.

This was new. I’d never been able to track a hollow with anything other than my eyes before, but now I felt that little compass needle inside me pointing behind us, and I could almost picture the creature scrambling toward flat ground. It was as if, upon seeing the hollow, I’d planted a sort of homing beacon in it with my eyes.

We raced around a corner — my fleeting fear of heights now apparently gone — and were confronted by a smooth wall of rock, fifty feet high at least. The path ended here; all around us the ground fell away at crazy angles. The wall had no ladders, no handholds. We searched frantically for some other way — a secret passage in the rock, a door, a tunnel — but there was none, and no way forward but up; and no way up, apparently, other than via hot air balloon or the helping hand of a probably mythical giant.

Panic took hold. Miss Peregrine began to screech and Claire to cry as Horace stood and wailed, “This is the end, we’re all going to die!” The rest looked for last-ditch ways to save ourselves. Fiona dragged her hands along the wall, searching for crevices that might contain soil from which she could grow a vine or something else we could climb. Hugh ran to the edge of the path and peered over the drop-off. “We could jump, if only we had a parachute!”

“I can be a parachute!” said Olive. “Take hold of my legs!”

But it was a long way down, and at the bottom was dark and dangerous forest. It was better, Bronwyn decided, to send Olive up the rock face than down the mountain, and with limp, feverish Claire in one arm, Bronwyn led Olive by the hand to the wall. “Give me your shoes!” she said to Olive. “Take Claire and Miss P and get to the top as quick as you can!”

Olive looked terrified. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough!” she cried.

“You’ve got to try, little magpie! You’re the only one who can keep them safe!” And she knelt and set Claire down on her feet, and the sick girl tottered into Olive’s arms. Olive squeezed her tight, slipped off her leaden shoes, and then, just as they began to rise, Bronwyn transferred Miss Peregrine from her shoulder to the top of Olive’s head. Weighed down, Olive rose very slowly — it was only when Miss Peregrine began to flap her good wing and pull Olive up by the hair, Olive yelping and kicking her feet, that the three of them really took off.

The hollow had nearly reached level ground. I knew it as surely as if I could see it with my eyes. Meanwhile, we scoured the ground for anything that might be used as a weapon — but all we could find were pebbles. “I can be a weapon,” said Emma, and she clapped her hands and drew them apart again, an impressive fireball roaring to life between them.

“And don’t forget about my bees!” said Hugh, opening his mouth to let them out. “They can be fierce when provoked!”

Enoch, who always found a way to laugh at the most inappropriate times, let out a big guffaw. “What’re you going to do,” he said, “pollinate it to death?”

Hugh ignored him, turning to me instead. “You’ll be our eyes, Jacob. Just tell us where the beast is and we’ll sting his brains out!”

My compass needle of pain told me it was on the path now, and the way its venom was expanding to fill me meant it was closing in fast. “Any minute now,” I said, pointing to the bend in the path we’d come around. “Get ready.” If not for the adrenaline flooding my system, the pain would’ve been totally debilitating.

We assumed fight-or-flight positions, some of us crouching with fists raised like boxers, others like sprinters before the starting gun, though no one knew which way to run.

“What a depressing and inauspicious end to our adventures,” said Horace. “Devoured by a hollow in some Welsh backwater!”

“I thought they couldn’t enter loops,” said Enoch. “How the hell did it get in here?”

“It would seem they have evolved,” said Millard.

“Who gives a chuck how it happened!” Emma snapped. “It’s here and it’s hungry!”

Then from above us a small voice cried, “Look out below!” and I craned my neck to see Olive’s face pull back and disappear over the top of the rock wall. A moment later something like a long rope came sailing over the ledge. It unreeled and snapped taut, and then a net unfurled at the end of it and smacked against the ground. “Hurry!” came Olive’s voice again. “There’s a lever up here — everyone grab hold of the net and I’ll pull it!”

We ran to the net, but it was tiny, hardly large enough for two. Pinned to the rope at eye level was a photograph of a man inside the net — this very net — with his legs folded in front of him and hanging just above the ground before a sheer rock face — this very rock face. On the back of the photo a message was printed:

ONLY ACCESS TO MENAGERIE: CLIMB INSIDE!

WEIGHT LIMIT: ONE RIDER

STRICTLY ENFORCED

This contraption was some sort of primitive elevator — meant for one rider at a time, not eight. But there was no time to use it as intended, so we all dog-piled onto it, sticking our arms and legs through its holes, clinging to the rope above it, attaching ourselves any way we could.

“Take us up!” I shouted. The hollow very close now; the pain extraordinary.

For a few endless seconds, nothing happened. The hollow bolted around the bend, using its muscular tongues like legs, its atrophied human limbs hanging useless. Then a metallic squeal rang out, the rope pulled taut, and we lurched into the air.

The hollow had nearly closed the distance between us. It galloped with jaws wide open, as if to collect us between its teeth the way a whale feeds on plankton. We weren’t quite halfway up the wall when it reached the ground below us, looked up, and squatted like a spring about to uncoil.

“It’s going to jump!” I shouted. “Pull your legs into the net!”

The hollow drove its tongues into the ground and sprang upward. We were rising fast and it seemed like the hollow would miss us, but just as it reached the apex of its jump, one of its tongues shot out and lassoed Emma around the ankle.

Emma screamed and kicked at it with her other foot as the net came to a jolting stop, the pulley above too weak to raise all of us and the hollow, too.

“Get it off me!” Emma shouted. “Get it off get it off get it off!”

I tried kicking at it, too, but the hollow’s tongue was as strong as woven steel and the tip was covered in hundreds of wriggling sucker-cups, so that anyone who tried to pry the tongue off would only get stuck to it themselves. And then the hollow was reeling itself up, its jaws inching closer until we could smell its stinking grave-breath.

Emma shouted for someone to hold her and with one hand I grabbed the back of her dress. Bronwyn let go of the net entirely, clinging to it with just her legs, then threw her arms around Emma’s waist. Then Emma let go, too — Bronwyn and I being all that kept her from falling — and with her hands now free she reached down and clapped them around the tongue.

The hollow shrieked. The sucker-cups along its tongue, withered and reeking black smoke, hissed from its flesh. Emma squeezed harder and closed her eyes and howled, not a cry of pain, I thought, but a kind of war cry, until the hollow was forced to release, its injured tentacle unslithering from around her ankle. There was a surreal moment where it was no longer the hollow who was holding Emma but Emma who was holding the hollow, the thing writhing and shrieking below us, the acrid smoke of its burned flesh filling our noses, until finally we had to shout at her to let go, and Emma’s eyes flew open again and she seemed to remember where she was and pulled her hands apart.

The hollow tumbled away from us, grasping at empty space as it fell. We rocketed up and away in the net, the tension that had been holding us down suddenly released, and soaring over the lip of the wall, we collapsed in a heap on top of it. Olive, Claire, and Miss Peregrine were waiting there for us, and as we extricated ourselves from the net and stumbled away from the cliff’s edge, Olive cheered, Miss Peregrine screeched and beat her good wing, and Claire raised her head from where she’d been lying on the ground and gave a weak smile.

We were giddy — and for the second time in as many days, stunned to be alive. “That’s twice you’ve saved our necks, little magpie,” Bronwyn said to Olive. “And Miss Emma, I already knew you were brave, but that was beyond anything!”

Emma shrugged it off. “It was him or me,” she said.

“I can’t believe you touched it,” said Horace.

Emma wiped her hands on her dress, held them to her nose, and made a face. “I just hope this smell comes off soon,” she said.

“That beast stank like a landfill!”

“How’s your ankle?” I asked her. “Does it hurt?”

She knelt and pushed down her sock to reveal a fat, red welt ringing it. “Not too bad,” she said, touching the ankle gingerly. But when she stood up again and put weight on it, I caught her wincing.

“A lot of help you were,” Enoch growled at me. “ ‘Run away!’ says the hollow-slayer’s grandson!”

“If my grandfather had run from the hollow that killed him, he might still be alive,” I said. “It’s good advice.”

I heard a thud from beyond the wall we’d just scaled, and the Feeling churned up inside me again. I went to the ledge and looked over. The hollow was alive and well at the base of the wall, and busy punching holes in the rock with its tongues.

“Bad news,” I said. “The fall didn’t kill it.”

In a moment Emma was at my side. “What’s it doing?”

I watched it twist one of its tongues into a hole it had made, then hoist itself up and begin making a second. It was creating footholds — or tongue-holds, rather.

“It’s trying to climb the wall,” I said. “Good God, it’s like the freaking Terminator.”

“The what?” said Emma.

I almost started to explain, then shook my head. It was a stupid comparison, anyway — hollowgast were scarier, and probably deadlier, than any movie monster.

“We have to stop it!” said Olive.

“Or better yet, run!” said Horace.

“No more running!” said Enoch. “Can we please just kill the damn thing?”

“Sure,” Emma said. “But how?”

“Anyone got a vat of boiling oil?” said Enoch.

“Will this do instead?” I heard Bronwyn say, and turned to see her lifting a boulder above her head.

“It might,” I said. “How’s your aim? Can you drop it where I tell you?”

“I’ll certainly try,” Bronwyn said, tottering toward the ledge with the rock balanced precariously on her hands.

We stood looking over the ledge. “Farther this way,” I said, urging her a few steps to the left. Just as I was about to give the signal for her to drop the boulder, though, the hollow leapt from one hold to the next, and now she was standing in the wrong place.

The hollow was getting faster at making the holds; now it was a moving target. To make matters worse, Bronwyn’s boulder was the only one in sight. If she missed, we wouldn’t get a second shot.

I forced myself to stare at the hollow despite a nearly unbearable urge to look away. For a few strange, head-swimmy seconds, the voices of my friends faded away and I could hear my own blood pumping in my ears and my heart thumping in the cavity of my chest, and my thoughts drifted to the creature that killed my grandfather; that stood over his torn and dying body before fleeing, cowardly, into the woods.

My vision rippled and my hands shook. I tried to steady myself.

You were born for this, I thought to myself. You were built to kill monsters like this. I repeated it under my breath like a mantra.

“Hurry up, please, Jacob,” Bronwyn said.

The creature faked left, then jumped right. I didn’t want to guess, and throw away our best chance at killing it. I wanted to know. And somehow, for some reason, I felt that I could.

I knelt, so close to the cliff’s edge now that Emma hooked two fingers through the back of my belt to keep me from falling. Focusing on the hollow, I repeated the mantra to myself — built to kill you, built to kill — and though the hollow was for the moment stationary, hacking away at one spot on the wall, I felt the compass needle in my gut prick ever so slightly to the right of it.

It was like a premonition.

Bronwyn was beginning to tremble under the boulder’s weight.

“I can’t hold this much longer!” she said.

I decided to trust my instinct. Even though the spot my compass pointed to was empty, I shouted for Bronwyn to drop the boulder there. She angled toward it and, with a groan of relief, let go of the rock.

The moment after she let go, the hollow leapt to the right — into the very place my compass had pointed. The hollow looked up to see the rock sailing toward it and poised to jump again — but there wasn’t time. The boulder slammed into the creature’s head and swept its body off the wall. With a thunderous crash, hollow and boulder hit the ground together. Tentacle tongues shot out from beneath the rock, shivered, went limp. Black blood followed, fanning around the boulder in a great, viscous puddle.

“Direct hit!” I yelled.

The kids began to jump and cheer. “It’s dead, it’s dead,” Olive cried, “the horrible hollow is dead!”

Bronwyn threw her arms around me. Emma kissed the top of my head. Horace shook my hand and Hugh slapped me on the back. Even Enoch congratulated me. “Good work,” he said a bit reluctantly. “Now don’t go getting a big head over it.”

I should’ve been overjoyed, but I hardly felt anything, just a spreading numbness as the trembling pain of the Feeling receded. Emma could see I was drained. Very sweetly, and in a way no one else could quite detect, she took my arm and half supported me as we walked away from the ledge. “That wasn’t luck,” she whispered in my ear. “I was right about you, Jacob Portman.”

The path that had dead-ended at the bottom of the wall began again here at the top, following the spine of a ridge up and over a hill.

“The sign on the rope said Access to Menagerie,” said Horace. “Do you suppose that’s what’s ahead?”

“You’re the one who dreams about the future,” said Enoch. “Suppose you tell us.”

“What’s a menagerie?” asked Olive.

“A collection of animals,” Emma explained. “Like a zoo, sort of.”

Olive squeaked and clapped her hands. “It’s Cuthbert’s friends! From the story! Oh, I can’t wait to meet them. Do you suppose that’s where the ymbryne lives, too?”

“At this juncture,” Millard said, “it’s best not to suppose anything.”

We started walking. I was still reeling from my encounter with the hollow. My ability did seem to be developing, as Millard said it would, growing like a muscle the more I worked it. Once I’d seen a hollow I could track it, and if I focused on it in just the right way, I could anticipate its next move, in some felt-more-than-known, gut-instinctual way. I felt a certain satisfaction at having learned something new about my peculiarity, and with nothing to teach me but experience. But this wasn’t a safe, controlled environment I was learning in. There were no bumper lanes to keep my ball out of the gutter. Any mistake I made would have immediate and deadly consequences, for both myself and those around me. I worried the others would start believing the hype about me — or worse yet, I would. And I knew that the minute I got cocky — the minute I stopped being pants-wettingly terrified of hollowgast — something terrible would happen.

Maybe it was lucky, then, that my terror-to-confidence ratio was at an all-time low. Ten-to-one, easy. I stuck my hands in my pockets as we walked, afraid the others would see them shaking.

“Look!” said Bronwyn, stopping in the middle of the path. “A house in the clouds!”

We were halfway up the ridge. Up ahead of us, high in the distance, was a house that almost seemed to be balanced on a cloudbank. As we walked farther and crested the hill, the clouds parted and the house came into full view. It was very small, and perched not atop a cloud but on a very large tower constructed entirely from stacked-up railroad ties, the whole thing set smack in the middle of a grassy plateau. It was one of the strangest man-made structures I’d ever seen. Around it on the plateau were scattered a few shacks, and at the far end was a small patch of woods, but we paid no attention — our eyes were on the tower.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“A lookout tower?” guessed Emma.

“A place to launch airplanes from?” said Hugh.

But there were no airplanes anywhere, nor any evidence of a landing strip.

“Perhaps it’s a place to launch zeppelins from,” said Millard.

I remembered old footage of the ill-fated Hindenburg docking to the top of what looked like a radio tower — a structure not so different from this — and felt a cold wave of dread pass through me. What if the balloons that hunted us on the beach were based here, and we’d unwittingly stumbled into a nest of wights?

“Or maybe it’s the ymbryne’s house,” said Olive. “Why does everyone always leap to the awfullest conclusions right away?”

“I’m sure Olive’s right,” said Hugh. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

He was answered right away by a loud, inhuman growl, which seemed to come from the shadows beneath the tower.

“What was that?” said Emma. “Another hollow?”

“I don’t think so,” I said; the Feeling still fading in me.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” said Horace, backing away.

But we didn’t have a choice; it wanted to meet us. The growl came again, prickling the hairs on my arms, and a moment later a furry face appeared between two of the lower railroad ties. It snarled at us like a rabid dog, reels of saliva dripping from its fang-toothed mouth.

“What in the name of the Elderfolk is that?” muttered Emma.

“Capital idea, coming into this loop,” said Enoch. “Really working out well for us so far.”

The whatever-it-was crawled out from between the ties and into the sun, where it crouched on its haunches and leered at us with an unbalanced smile, as if imagining how our brains might taste. I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal; dressed in rags, it had the body of a man but carried itself like an ape, its hunched form like some long-lost ancestor of ours whose evolution had been arrested millions of years ago. Its eyes and teeth were a dull yellow, its skin pale and blotched with dark spots, its hair a long, matted nest.

“Someone make it die!” Horace said. “Or at least make it quit looking at me!”

Bronwyn set Claire down and assumed a fighting stance, while Emma held out her hands to make a flame — but she was too stunned, apparently, to summon more than a sputter of smoke. The man-thing tensed, snarled, and then took off like an Olympic sprinter — not toward us but around us, diving behind a pile of rocks and popping up again with a fang-bearing grin. It was toying with us, like a cat toys with its prey just before the kill.

It seemed about to make another run — at us this time — when a voice from behind commanded it to “Sit down and behave!” And the thing did, relaxing onto its hindquarters, tongue lolling from its mouth in a dopey grin.

We turned to see a dog trotting calmly in our direction. I looked past it to see who had spoken, but there was no one — and then the dog itself opened its mouth and said, “Don’t mind Grunt, he’s got no manners at all! That’s just his way of saying thank you. That hollowgast was most bothersome.”

The dog seemed to be talking to me, but I was too surprised to respond. Not only was it speaking in an almost-human voice — and a refined British one at that — but it held in its jowly mouth a pipe and on its face wore a pair of round, green-tinted glasses. “Oh dear, I hope you’re not too offended,” the dog continued, misinterpreting my silence. “Grunt means well, but you’ll have to excuse him. He was, quite literally, raised in a barn. I, on the other hand, was educated on a grand estate, the seventh pup of the seventh pup in an illustrious line of hunting dogs.” He bowed as well as a dog could, dipping his nose to the ground. “Addison MacHenry, at your humble service.”

“That’s a fancy name for a dog,” said Enoch, apparently unimpressed to meet a talking animal.

Addison peered over his glasses at Enoch and said, “And by what appellation, dare I ask, are you denominated?”

“Enoch O’Connor,” Enoch said proudly, sticking his chest out a little.

“That’s a fancy name for a grimy, pudge-faced boy,” Addison said, and then he stood up on his hind legs, rising nearly to Enoch’s height. “I am a dog, yes, but a peculiar one. Why, then, should I be saddled with a common dog’s name? My former master called me ‘Boxie’ and I despised it — an assault on my dignity! — so I bit him on the face and took his name. Addison: much more befitting an animal of my intellectual prowess, I think. That was just before Miss Wren discovered me and brought me here.”

Faces brightened at the mention of an ymbryne’s name, a pulse of hope firing through us.

“Miss Wren brought you?” said Olive. “But what about Cuthbert the giant?”

“Who?” Addison said, and then he shook his head. “Ah, right, the story. It’s just that, I’m afraid — a story, inspired long ago by that curious rock down below and Miss Wren’s peculiar menagerie.”

“Told you,” muttered Enoch.

“Where’s Miss Wren now?” Emma said. “We’ve got to speak to her!”

Addison looked up at the house atop the tower and said, “That’s her residence, but she isn’t home at the moment. She winged off some days ago to help her ymbryne sisters in London. There’s a war on, you see … I assume you’ve heard all about it? Which explains why you’re traveling in the degraded style of refugees?”

“Our loop was raided,” said Emma. “And then we lost our things at sea.”

“And nearly ourselves,” Millard added.

At the sound of Millard’s voice, the dog startled. “An invisible! What a rare surprise. And an American, too,” he said, nodding at me. “What a peculiar lot you are, even for peculiars.” He fell back onto all fours and turned toward the tower. “Come, I’ll introduce you to the others. They’ll be absolutely fascinated to meet you. And you must be famished from your journey, poor creatures. Nutrifying provender shall be forthcoming!”

“We need medicine, too,” said Bronwyn, kneeling to pick up Claire. “This little one is very ill!”

“We’ll do all we can for her,” the dog said. “We owe you that and more for solving our little hollowgast problem. Most bothersome, as I was saying.”

“Nutrifying what did he say?” said Olive.

“Sustenance, comestibles, rations!” the dog replied. “You’ll eat like royalty here.”

“But I don’t like dog food,” said Olive.

Addison laughed, the timbre surprisingly human. “Neither do I, miss.”

CHAPTER IV

Addison walked on all fours with his snub nose in the air while the man-thing called Grunt scampered around us like a psychotic puppy. From behind tufts of grass and the shacks scattered here and there, I could see faces peeking out at us — furry, most of them, and of all different shapes and sizes. When we came to the middle of the plateau, Addison reared up on his hind legs and called out, “Don’t be afraid, fellows! Come and meet the children who dispatched our unwelcome visitor!”

One by one, a parade of bizarre animals ventured out into the open. Addison introduced them as they came. The first creature looked like the top half of a miniature giraffe sutured onto the bottom half of a donkey. It walked awkwardly on two hind legs — its only limbs. “This is Deirdre,” said Addison. “She’s an emu-raffe, which is a bit like a donkey and a giraffe put together, only with fewer legs and a peevish temper. She’s a terrible sore loser at cards,” he added in a whisper. “Never play an emu-raffe at cards. Say hello, Deirdre!”

“Goodbye!” Deirdre said, her big horse lips pulling back into a bucktoothed grin. “Terrible day! Very displeased to meet you!” Then she laughed — a braying, high-pitched whinny — and said, “Only teasing!”

“Deirdre thinks she’s quite funny,” Addison explained.

“If you’re like a donkey and a giraffe,” said Olive, “then why aren’t you called a donkey-raffe?”

Deirdre frowned and answered, “Because what kind of an awful name is that? Emu-raffe rolls off the tongue, don’t you think?” And then she stuck out her tongue — fat, pink, and three feet long — and pushed Olive’s tiara back on her head with its tip. Olive squealed and ran behind Bronwyn, giggling.

“Do all the animals here talk?” I asked.

“Just Deirdre and I,” Addison said, “and a good thing, too. The chickens won’t shut up as it is, and they can’t say a word!” Right on cue, a flock of clucking chickens bobbled toward us from a burned and blackened coop. “Ah!” said Addison. “Here come the girls now.”

“What happened to their coop?” Emma asked.

“Every time we repair it, they burn it down again,” he said. “Such a bother.” Addison turned and nodded in the other direction. “You might want to back away a bit. When they get excited …”

BANG! — a sound like a quarter-stick of dynamite going off made us all jump, and the coop’s last few undamaged boards splintered and flew into the air.

“… their eggs go off,” he finished.

When the smoke cleared, we saw the chickens still coming toward us, unhurt and seemingly unsurprised by the blast, a little cloud of feathers wafting around them like fat snowflakes.

Enoch’s jaw fell open. “Are you telling me these chickens lay exploding eggs?!” he said.

“Only when they get excited,” said Addison. “Most of their eggs are quite safe — and delicious! But it was the exploding ones that earned them their rather unkind name: Armageddon chickens.”

“Keep away from us!” Emma shouted as the chickens closed in. “You’ll blow us all up!”

Addison laughed. “They’re sweet and harmless, I assure you, and they don’t lay anywhere but inside their coop.” The chickens clucked happily around our feet. “You see?” the dog said. “They like you!”

“This is a madhouse!” said Horace.

Deirdre laughed. “No, doveling. It’s a menagerie.”

Then Addison introduced us to a few animals whose peculiarities were subtler, including an owl who watched us from a branch, silent and intense, and a cadre of mice who seemed to fade subtly in and out of view, as if they spent half their time on some other plane of reality. There was a goat, too, with very long horns and deep black eyes; an orphan from a herd of peculiar goats who once roamed the forest below.

When all the animals were assembled, Addison cried, “Three cheers for the hollow-killers!” Deirdre brayed and the goat stamped the ground and the owl hooted and the chickens clucked and Grunt grunted his appreciation. And while all this was going on, Bronwyn and Emma kept trading looks — Bronwyn glancing down at her coat, where Miss Peregrine was hiding, and then raising her eyebrows at Emma to ask, Now? and Emma shaking her head in reply: Not quite yet.

Bronwyn laid Claire in a patch of grass beneath a shade tree. She was sweating and shivering, fading in and out of consciousness.

“There’s a special elixir I’ve seen Miss Wren prepare for treating fever,” Addison said. “Foul-tasting but effective.”

“My mom used to make me chicken soup,” I offered.

The chickens squawked with alarm, and Addison shot me a nasty look. “He was joking!” he said. “Only joking, such an absurd joke, ha-ha! There’s no such thing as chicken soup!”

With the help of Grunt and his opposable thumbs, Addison and the emu-raffe went to prepare the elixir. In a little while they returned with a bowl of what looked like dirty dishwater. Once Claire had drunk every drop and fallen back asleep, the animals laid out a modest feast for us: baskets of fresh bread and stewed apples and hard-boiled eggs — of the nonexploding variety — all served straight into our hands, as they had no plates or silverware. I didn’t realize how hungry I’d been until I wolfed down three eggs and a loaf of bread in under five minutes.

When I was done I belched and wiped my mouth and looked up to see all the animals looking back, watching us eagerly, their faces so alive with intelligence that I went a little numb and had to fight an overwhelming sensation that I was dreaming.

Millard was eating next to me, and I turned to him and asked, “Before this, had you ever heard of peculiar animals?”

“Only in children’s stories,” he said through a mouthful of bread. “How strange, then, that it was one such story that led us to them.”

Only Olive seemed unfazed by it all, perhaps because she was still so young — or part of her was, anyway — and the distance between stories and real life did not yet seem so great. “Where are the other animals?” she asked Addison. “In Cuthbert’s tale there were stilt-legged grimbears and two-headed lynxes.”

And just like that, the animals’ jubilant mood wilted. Grunt hid his face in his big hands and Deirdre let out a neighing groan. “Don’t ask, don’t ask,” she said, hanging her long head. But it was too late.

“These children helped us,” Addison said. “They deserve to hear our sad story, if they wish.”

“If you don’t mind telling us,” said Emma.

“I love sad stories,” said Enoch. “Especially ones where princesses get eaten by dragons and everyone dies in the end.”

Addison cleared his throat. “In our case, it’s more that the dragon got eaten by the princess,” he said. “It’s been a rough few years for the likes of us, and it was a rough few centuries prior to that.” The dog paced back and forth, his voice taking on a preacherly kind of grandness. “Once upon a time, this world was full of peculiar animals. In the Aldinn days, there were more peculiar animals on Earth than there were peculiar folk. We came in every shape and size you could imagine: whales that could fly like birds, worms as big as houses, dogs twice as intelligent as I am, if you can believe it. Some had kingdoms all their own, ruled over by animal leaders.” A spark moved behind the dog’s eyes, barely detectable — as if he were old enough to remember the world in such a state — and then he sighed deeply, the spark snuffed, and continued. “But our numbers are not a fraction of what they were. We have fallen into near extinction. Do any of you know what became of the peculiar animals that once roamed the world?”

We chewed silently, ashamed that we didn’t.

“Right, then,” he said. “Come with me and I’ll show you.” And he trotted out into the sun and looked back, waiting for us to follow.

“Please, Addie,” said the emu-raffe. “Not now — our guests are eating!”

“They asked, and now I’m telling them,” said Addison. “Their bread will still be here in a few minutes!”

Reluctantly, we put down our food and followed the dog. Fiona stayed behind to watch Claire, who was still sleeping, and with Grunt and the emu-raffe loping after us, we crossed the plateau to the little patch of woods that grew at the far edge. A gravel path wound through the trees, and we crunched along it toward a clearing. Just before we reached it, Addison said, “May I introduce you to the finest peculiar animals who ever lived!” and the trees parted to reveal a small graveyard filled with neat rows of white headstones.

“Oh, no,” I heard Bronwyn say.

“There are probably more peculiar animals buried here than are currently alive in all of Europe,” Addison said, moving through the graves to reach one in particular, which he leaned on with his forepaws. “This one’s name was Pompey. She was a fine dog, and could heal wounds with a few licks of her tongue. A wonder to behold! And yet this is how she was treated.” Addison clicked his tongue and Grunt scurried forward with a little book in his hands, which he thrust into mine. It was a photo album, opened to a picture of a dog that had been harnessed, like a mule or a horse, to a little wagon. “She was enslaved by carnival folk,” Addison said, “forced to pull fat, spoiled children like some common beast of burden — whipped, even, with riding crops!” His eyes burned with anger. “By the time Miss Wren rescued her, Pompey was so depressed she was nearly dead from it. She lingered on for only a few weeks after she arrived, then was interred here.”

I passed the book around. Everyone who saw the photo sighed or shook their head or muttered bitterly to themselves.

Addison crossed to another grave. “Grander still was Ca’ab Magda,” he said, “an eighteen-tusked wildebeest who roamed the loops of Outer Mongolia. She was terrifying! The ground thundered under her hooves when she ran! They say she even marched over the Alps with Hannibal’s army in 218 BC. Then, some years ago, a hunter shot her.”

Grunt showed us a picture of an older woman who looked like she’d just gotten back from an African safari, seated in a bizarre chair made of horns.

“I don’t understand,” said Emma, peering at the photo. “Where’s

Ca’ab Magda?”

“Being sat upon,” said Addison. “The hunter fashioned her horns into a chair.”

Emma nearly dropped the album. “That’s disgusting!”

“If that’s her,” said Enoch, tapping the photo, “then what’s buried here?”

“The chair,” said Addison. “What a pitiful waste of a peculiar life.”

“This burying ground is filled with stories like Magda’s,” Addison said. “Miss Wren meant this menagerie to be an ark, but gradually it’s become a tomb.”

“Like all our loops,” said Enoch. “Like peculiardom itself. A failed experiment.”

“ ‘This place is dying,’ Miss Wren often said.” Addison’s voice rose in imitation of her. “ ‘And I am nothing but the overseer of its long funeral!’ ”

Addison’s eyes glistened, remembering her, but just as quickly went hard again. “She was very theatrical.”

“Please don’t refer to our ymbryne in the past tense,” Deirdre said.

“Is,” he said. “Sorry. Is.”

“They hunted you,” said Emma, her voice wavering with emotion. “Stuffed you and put you in zoos.”

“Just like the hunters did in Cuthbert’s story,” said Olive.

“Yes,” said Addison. “Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.”

“But there was no Cuthbert,” said Olive, beginning to understand. “No giant. Just a bird.”

“A very special bird,” said Deirdre.

“You’re worried about her,” I said.

“Of course we are,” said Addison. “To my knowledge, Miss Wren is the only remaining uncaptured ymbryne. When she heard that her kidnapped sisters had been spirited away to London, she flew off to render assistance without a moment’s thought for her own safety.”

“Nor ours,” Deirdre muttered.

“London?” said Emma. “Are you sure that’s where the kidnapped ymbrynes were taken?”

“Absolutely certain,” the dog replied. “Miss Wren has spies in the city — a certain flock of peculiar pigeons who watch everything and report back to her. Recently, several came to us in a state of terrible distress. They had it on good information that the ymbrynes were — and still are — being held in the punishment loops.”

Several of the children gasped, but I had no idea what the dog meant. “What’s a punishment loop?” I asked.

“They were designed to hold captured wights, hardened criminals, and the dangerously insane,” Millard explained. “They’re nothing like the loops we know. Nasty, nasty places.”

“And now it is the wights, and undoubtedly their hollows, who are guarding them,” said Addison.

“Good God!” exclaimed Horace. “Then it’s worse than we feared!”

“Are you joking?” said Enoch. “This is precisely the sort of thing I feared!”

“Whatever nefarious end the wights are seeking,” Addison said, “it’s clear that they need all the ymbrynes to accomplish it. Now only Miss Wren is left … brave, foolhardy Miss Wren … and who knows for how long!” Then he whimpered the way some dogs do during thunderstorms, tucking his ears back and lowering his head.

We went back to the shade tree and finished our meals, and when we were stuffed and couldn’t eat another bite, Bronwyn turned to Addison and said, “You know, Mister Dog, everything’s not quite as dire as you say.” Then she looked at Emma and raised her eyebrows, and this time Emma nodded.

“Is that so,” Addison replied.

“Yes, it is. In fact, I have something right here that may just cheer you up.”

“I rather doubt that,” the dog muttered, but he lifted his head from his paws to see what it was anyway.

Bronwyn opened her coat and said, “I’d like you to meet the second-to-last uncaptured ymbryne, Miss Alma Peregrine.” The bird poked her head out into the sunlight and blinked.

Now it was the animals’ turn to be amazed. Deirdre gasped and Grunt squealed and clapped his hands and the chickens flapped their useless wings.

“But we heard your loop was raided!” Addison said. “Your ymbryne stolen!”

“She was,” Emma said proudly, “but we stole her back!”

“In that case,” said Addison, bowing to Miss Peregrine, “it is a most extraordinary pleasure, madam. I am your servant. Should you require a place to change, I’ll happily show you to Miss Wren’s private quarters.”

“She can’t change,” said Bronwyn.

“What’s that?” said Addison. “Is she shy?”

“No,” said Bronwyn. “She’s stuck.”

The pipe dropped from Addison’s mouth. “Oh, no,” he said quietly. “Are you quite certain?”

“She’s been like this for two days now,” said Emma. “I think if she could change back, she would’ve done it by now.”

Addison shook the glasses from his face and peered at the bird, his eyes wide with concern. “May I examine her?” he asked.

“He’s a regular Doctor Dolittle,” said the emu-raffe. “Addie treats us all when we’re sick.”

Bronwyn lifted Miss Peregrine out of her coat and set the bird on the ground. “Just be careful of her hurt wing,” she said.

“Of course,” said Addison. He began by making a slow circle around the bird, studying her from every angle. Then he sniffed her head and wings with his big, wet nose. “Tell me what happened to her,” he said finally, “and when, and how. Tell me all of it.”

Emma recounted the whole story: how Miss Peregrine was kidnapped by Golan, how she nearly drowned in her cage in the ocean, how we’d rescued her from a submarine piloted by wights. The animals listened, rapt. When we’d finished, the dog took a moment to gather his thoughts, then delivered his diagnosis: “She’s been poisoned. I’m certain of it. Dosed with something that’s keeping her in bird form artificially.”

“Really?” said Emma. “How do you know?”

“To kidnap and transport ymbrynes is a dangerous business when they’re in human form and can perform their time-stopping tricks. As birds, however, their powers are very limited. This way, your mistress is compact, easily hidden … much less of a threat.” He looked at Miss Peregrine. “Did the wight who took you spray you with anything?” he asked her. “A liquid or a gas?”

Miss Peregrine bobbed her head in the air — what seemed to be a nod.

Bronwyn gasped. “Oh, miss, I’m so awfully sorry. We had no idea.”

I felt a stab of guilt. I had led the wights to the island. I was the reason this had happened to Miss Peregrine. I had caused the peculiar children to lose their home, at least partly. The shame of it lodged like a stone in my throat.

I said, “She’ll get better though, won’t she? She’ll turn back?”

“Her wing will mend,” Addison replied, “but without help she won’t turn human again.”

“What sort of help does she need?” Emma asked. “Can you give it to her?”

“Only another ymbryne can assist her. And she’s running very short on time.”

I tensed. This was something new.

“What do you mean?” Emma said.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” said Addison, “but two days is a very long time for an ymbryne to be arrested like this. The more time she spends as a bird, the more her human self will be lost. Her memory, her words — everything that made her who she was — until, eventually, she won’t be an ymbryne at all anymore. She’ll just be a bird, for good and ever.”

An image came to me of Miss Peregrine splayed on an emergency room table, buzzed around by doctors, her breathing stopped — every second that ticked by doing her brain some new and irreparable harm.

“How long?” asked Millard. “How much longer does she have?”

Addison squinted, shook his head. “Two days, if she’s strong.”

Whispers and gasps. We collectively went pale.

“Are you sure?” said Emma. “Are you absolutely, positively certain?”

“I’ve seen it happen before.” Addison padded over to the little owl, who was perched on a branch nearby. “Olivia here was a young ymbryne who had a bad accident during her training. They brought her to us five days later. Miss Wren and I did everything we could to try to change her back, but she was beyond help. That was ten years ago; she’s been this way ever since.”

The owl stared mutely. There was no life in her anymore beyond that of an animal; you could see it in the dullness of her eyes.

Emma stood. She seemed about to say something — to rally us, I hoped, kick us into action with some inspiring speech — but she couldn’t seem to get the words out. Choking back a sob, she stumbled away from us.

I called after her, but she didn’t stop. The others just watched her go, stunned by the terrible news; stunned, too, by any sign of weakness or indecision from Emma. She had maintained her strength in the face of all this for so long that we had come to take it for granted, but she wasn’t bulletproof. She might’ve been peculiar, but she was also human.

“You’d better fetch her, Mister Jacob,” Bronwyn said to me. “We mustn’t linger here too long.”

When I caught up to Emma she was standing near the plateau’s edge, gazing out at the countryside below, sloping green hills falling away to a distant plain. She heard me coming but didn’t turn to look.

I shuffled up next to her and tried to think of something comforting to say. “I know you’re scared, and — and three days doesn’t seem like a long time, but — ”

“Two days,” she said. “Two days maybe.” Her lip trembled. “And that’s not even the worst of it.”

I balked. “How could things possibly be worse?”

She’d been waging a battle against tears, but now, in a sudden break, she lost it. She sank to the ground and sobbed, a storm overtaking her. I knelt and wrapped my arms around her and hung on. “I’m so sorry,” she said, repeating it three times, her voice raw, a fraying rope. “You never should’ve stayed. I shouldn’t have let you. But I was selfish … so terribly selfish!”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “I’m here — I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

That only seemed to make her cry harder. I pressed my lips to her forehead and kissed it until the storm began to pass out of her, the sobs fading to whimpers. “Please talk to me,” I said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

After a minute she sat up, wiped her eyes, and tried to compose herself. “I had hoped I’d never have to say this,” she said. “That it wouldn’t matter. Do you remember when I told you, the night you decided to come with us, that you might never be able to go home again?”

“Of course I do.”

“I didn’t know until just now how true that really was. I’m afraid I’ve doomed you, Jacob, my sweet friend, to a short life trapped in a dying world.” She drew a quivering breath, then continued. “You came to us through Miss Peregrine’s loop, and that means only Miss Peregrine or her loop can send you back. But her loop is gone now — or if it isn’t yet, it will be soon — which leaves Miss Peregrine herself as your only way home. But if she never turns human again …”

I swallowed hard, my throat dry. “Then I’m stuck in the past.”

“Yes. And the only way to return to the time you knew as your own would be to wait for it — day by day, year by year.”

Seventy years. By then my parents, and everyone I ever knew or cared about, would be dead, and I’d be long dead to all of them. Of course, provided we survived whatever tribulations we were about to face, I could always go and find my parents in a few decades, once they were born — but what would be the point? They’d be children, and strangers to me.

I wondered when my present-day back-home parents would give up on finding me alive. What story they’d tell themselves to make sense of my disappearance. Had I run away? Gone insane? Thrown myself off a sea cliff?

Would they have a funeral for me? Buy me a coffin? Write my name on a gravestone?

I’d become a mystery they would never solve. A wound that would never heal.

“I’m so sorry,” Emma said again. “If I’d known Miss Peregrine’s condition was so dire, I swear to you, I never would’ve asked you to stay. The present means nothing to the rest of us. It’ll kill us if we stay there too long! But you — you still have family, a life …”

“No!” I said, shouting, slapping the ground with my hand — chasing away the self-pitying thoughts that had started to cloud my head. “That’s all gone now. I chose this.”

Emma laid her hand atop mine and said gently: “If what the animals say is true, and all our ymbrynes have been kidnapped, soon even this won’t be here.” She gathered some dirt in her hand and scattered it in the breeze. “Without ymbrynes to maintain them, our loops will collapse. The wights will use the ymbrynes to re-create their damned experiment and it’ll be 1908 all over again — and either they’ll fail and turn all creation into a smoking crater, or they’ll succeed and make themselves immortal, and we’ll be ruled by those monsters. Either way, before long we’ll be more extinct than the peculiar animals! And now I’ve dragged you into this hopeless mess — and for what?”

“Everything happens for a reason,” I said.

I couldn’t believe those words had come out of my mouth, but as soon as they were spoken I felt the truth of them, resonating in me loud as a bell.

I was here for a reason. There was something I was meant not simply to be, but to do — and it wasn’t to run or hide or give up the minute things seemed terrifying and impossible.

“I thought you didn’t believe in destiny,” said Emma, assessing me skeptically.

I didn’t — not exactly — but I wasn’t quite sure how to explain what I did believe, either. I thought back to the stories my grandfather used to tell me. They were filled with wonder and adventure, but something deeper ran through them, as well — a sense of abiding gratitude. As a kid I’d focused on Grandpa Portman’s descriptions of a magical-sounding island and peculiar children with fantastic powers, but at heart his stories were about Miss Peregrine, and how, in a time of great need, she had helped him. When he arrived in Wales, my grandfather had been a young, frightened boy who didn’t speak the language, a boy hunted by two kinds of monsters: one that would eventually kill most of his family, and the other, cartoonishly grotesque and invisible to all but him, which must’ve seemed lifted directly from his nightmares. In the face of all this, Miss Peregrine had hidden him, given him a home, and helped him discover who he really was — she had saved his life, and in doing so had enabled my father’s life, and by extension, my own. My parents had birthed and raised and loved me, and for that I owed them a debt. But I would never have been born in the first place if not for the great and selfless kindness Miss Peregrine had shown my grandfather. I was coming to believe I had been sent here to repay that debt — my own, my father’s, and my grandfather’s, too.

I tried my best to explain. “It’s not about destiny,” I said, “but I do think there’s balance in the world, and sometimes forces we don’t understand intervene to tip the scales the right way. Miss Peregrine saved my grandfather — and now I’m here to help save her.”

Emma narrowed her eyes and nodded slowly. I couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with me or thinking of a polite way to tell me I’d lost my mind.

Then she hugged me.

I didn’t need to explain any further. She understood.

She owed Miss Peregrine her life, too.

“We’ve got three days,” I said. “We’ll go to London, free one of the ymbrynes, and fix Miss Peregrine. It’s not hopeless. We’ll save her, Emma — or we’ll die trying.” The words sounded so brave and resolute that for a moment I wondered if it was really me who’d said them.

Emma surprised me by laughing, as if this struck her as funny somehow, and then she looked away for a moment. When she looked back again her jaw was set and her eyes shone; her old confidence was returning. “Sometimes I can’t decide whether you’re completely mad or some sort of miracle,” she said. “Though I’m starting to think it’s the latter.”

She put her arms around me again and we held each other for a long moment, her head on my shoulder, breath warm on my neck, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to close all the little gaps that existed between our bodies, to collapse into one being. But then she pulled away and kissed my forehead and started back toward the others. I was too dazed to follow right away, because there was something new happening, a wheel inside my heart I’d never noticed before, and it was spinning so fast it made me dizzy. And the farther away she got, the faster it spun, like there was an invisible cord unreeling from it that stretched between us, and if she went too far it would snap — and kill me.

I wondered if this strange, sweet pain was love.

The others were clustered together beneath the shade tree, children and animals together. Emma and I strode toward them. I had an impulse to link arms with her, and nearly did before something caught me and I thought better of it. I was suddenly aware — as Enoch turned to look at us with that certain suspicion he always reserved for me and now, increasingly, for both of us — that Emma and I were becoming a unit apart from the others, a private alliance with its own secrets and promises.

Bronwyn stood as we approached. “Are you allright, Miss Emma?”

“Yes, yes,” Emma said quickly, “had something caught in my eye, was all. Now, everyone gather your things. We must go to London at once, and see about making Miss Peregrine whole again!”

“We’re thrilled you agree,” Enoch said with an eye roll. “We came to the same conclusion several minutes ago, while you two were over there whispering.”

Emma flushed, but she declined to take Enoch’s bait. There were more important things to attend to now than petty conflicts — namely, the many exotic dangers of the journey we were about to undertake. “As I’m sure you’re all aware,” Emma said, “this is by most standards a very poor plan with little hope of success.” She laid out some of the reasons why. London was far away — not by the standards of the present-day world, maybe, when we might’ve GPSed our way to the nearest train station and caught an express that would’ve whisked us to the city center in a few hours. In 1940, though, in a Britain convulsed by war, London was a world away: the roads and rails might be clogged by refugees, or ruined by bombs, or monopolized by military convoys, any of which would cost us time Miss Peregrine didn’t have to spare. Worse, we would be hunted — and even more intensely than we had already been, now that nearly all the other ymbrynes had been captured.

“Forget the journey!” said Addison. “That’s the least of your worries! Perhaps I was not sufficiently dissuasive when we discussed this earlier. Perhaps you do not fully understand the circumstances of the ymbrynes’ incarceration.” He enunciated each syllable as if we were hard of hearing. “Haven’t any of you read about the punishment loops in your peculiar history books?”

“Of course we have,” said Emma.

“Then you’ll know that attempting to breach them is tantamount to suicide. They’re death traps, every one of them, containing the very bloodiest episodes from London’s history — the Great Fire of 1666; the exceedingly lethal Viking Siege of 842; the pestilent height of the terrible Plague! They don’t publish temporal maps of these places, for obvious reasons. So unless one of you has a working knowledge of the secretest parts of peculiardom …”

“I am a student of obscure and unpleasant loops,” Millard spoke up. “Been a pet hobby for many years.”

“Bully for you!” said Addison. “Then I suppose you have a way to get past the horde of hollows who’ll be guarding their entrances as well!”

Suddenly it felt like everyone’s eyes were on me. I swallowed hard, kept my chin high, and said, “Yeah, in fact, we do.”

“We’d better,” grumbled Enoch.

Then Bronwyn said, “I believe in you, Jacob. I haven’t known you too long, but I feel I know your heart, and it’s a strong, true thing — a peculiar heart — and I trust you.” She leaned against me and hugged my shoulder with one arm, and I felt my throat tighten.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling lame and small in the face of her big emotion.

The dog clucked his tongue. “Madness. You children have no self-preservation instincts at all. It’s a wonder any of you are still breathing.”

Emma stepped in front of Addison and tried to shut him down. “Yes, wonderful,” she said, “thank you for illuminating us with your opinion. Now, doomsaying aside, I have to ask the rest of you: Are there any objections to what we’re proposing? I don’t want anyone volunteering because they feel pressured.”

Slowly, timidly, Horace raised his hand. “If London is where all the wights are, won’t going there be walking right into their hands? Is that a good idea?”

“It’s a genius idea,” Enoch said irritably. “The wights are convinced we peculiar children are docile and weak. Us coming after them is the last thing they’d expect.”

“And if we fail?” said Horace. “We’ll have hand-delivered Miss Peregrine right to their doorstep!”

“We don’t know that,” said Hugh. “That London is their doorstep.”

Enoch snorted. “Don’t sugarcoat things. If they’ve broken open the prison loops and they’re using them to keep our ymbrynes, then you can bet your soft parts they’ve overrun the rest of the city, too! It’ll be absolutely crawling with them, mark my words. If it weren’t, the wights would never have bothered coming after us in little old Cairnholm. It’s basic military strategy. In battle you don’t aim for the enemy’s pinky toe first — you stab him right through the heart!”

“Please,” Horace moaned, “enough talk of smashing loops and stabbing hearts. You’ll frighten the little ones!”

“I ain’t scared!” said Olive.

Horace shrank into himself. Someone muttered the word coward.

“None of that!” Emma said sharply. “There’s nothing wrong with being frightened. It means you’re taking this very serious thing we’re proposing very seriously. Because, yes, it will be dangerous. Yes, the chances of success are abysmal. And should we even make it to London, there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to find the ymbrynes, much less rescue one. It’s entirely likely that we’ll end our days wasting away in some wightish prison cell or dissolved in the belly of a hollowgast. Everyone got that?”

Grim nods of understanding.

“Am I sugarcoating anything, Enoch?”

Enoch shook his head.

“If we try this,” Emma went on, “we may well lose Miss Peregrine. That much is uncontroversial. But if we don’t try, if we don’t go, then there’s no question we’ll lose her — and the wights will likely catch us anyway! That said, anyone who doesn’t feel up to it can stay behind.” She meant Horace and we all knew it. Horace stared at a spot on the ground. “You can stay here where it’s safe, and we’ll come collect you later, when the trouble’s through. There’s no shame in it.”

“My left ventricle!” said Horace. “If I sat this out, I’d never live it down.”

Even Claire refused to be left behind. “I’ve just had eighty years of pleasantly boring days,” she said, raising up on one elbow from the shady spot where she’d been sleeping. “Stay here while the rest of you go adventuring? Not a chance!” But when she tried to stand, she found she couldn’t, and lay back again, coughing and dizzy. Though the dishwatery liquid she’d drunk had cooled her fever some, there was no way she’d be able to make the journey to London — not today, not tomorrow, and certainly not in time to help Miss Peregrine. Someone would have to stay behind with Claire while she recuperated.

Emma asked for volunteers. Olive raised her hand, but Bronwyn told her to forget it — she was too young. Bronwyn started to raise her own hand, then thought better of it. She was torn, she said, between wanting to protect Claire and her sense of duty to Miss Peregrine.

Enoch elbowed Horace. “What’s the matter with you?” Enoch taunted. “Here’s your big chance to stay behind!”

“I want to go adventuring, I really and truly do,” Horace insisted. “But I should also like to see my 105th birthday, if at all possible. Promise we won’t try to save the whole blasted world?”

“We just want to save Miss P,” said Emma, “but I make no guarantees about anyone’s birthday.”

Horace seemed satisfied with this, and his hands stayed planted at his sides.

“Anyone else?” said Emma, looking around.

“It’s all right,” Claire said. “I can manage on my own.”

“Out of the question,” said Emma. “We peculiars stick together.”

Fiona’s hand drifted up. She’d been so quiet, I’d nearly forgotten she was sitting with us.

“Fee, you can’t!” said Hugh. He looked hurt, as if by volunteering to stay behind she was rejecting him. She looked at him with big, sad eyes, but her hand stayed in the air.

“Thank you, Fiona,” said Emma. “With any luck, we’ll see you both again in just a few days.”

“Bird willing,” said Bronwyn.

“Bird willing,” echoed the others.

Afternoon was slipping toward evening. In an hour the animals’ loop would be dark, and finding our way down the mountain would be much more dangerous. As we made preparations to leave, the animals kindly outfitted us with stores of fresh food and sweaters spun from the wool of peculiar sheep, which Deirdre swore had some peculiar property, though what exactly it was she couldn’t quite remember. “Impervious to fire, I think — or perhaps water. Yes, they never sink in water, like fluffy little lifejackets. Or maybe — oh, I don’t know, they’re warm in any case!”

We thanked her and folded them into Bronwyn’s trunk. Then Grunt came loping forward holding a package wrapped up with paper and twine. “A gift from the chickens,” Deirdre explained, winking as Grunt pressed it into my hands. “Don’t drop it.”

A smarter person than I might’ve thought twice about bringing explosives along on our trip, but we were feeling vulnerable, and both the dog and emu-raffe swore that if we were gentle with the eggs they wouldn’t go off, so we nestled them carefully between the sweaters in Bronwyn’s trunk. Now at least we wouldn’t have to face men with guns without weapons of our own.

Then we were nearly ready, except for one thing: when we left the animals’ loop, we’d be just as lost as when we’d come in. We needed directions.

“I can show you the way out of the forest,” said Addison. “Meet me at the top of Miss Wren’s tower.”

The space up top was so small that only two of us could fit at a time, so Emma and I went, climbing its railroad ties like the rungs of a giant ladder. Grunt monkeyed his way up in half the time, delivering Addison to the top under one arm.

The view from the top was amazing. To the east, forested slopes stretched away to a vast, barren plain. To the west, you could see all the way to the ocean, where an old-looking ship rigged with giant, complicated sails glided down the coast. I’d never asked what year it was here — 1492? 1750?—though to the animals I guess it hardly mattered. This was a safe place apart from the world of people, and only in the world of people did the year make any difference.

“You’ll head north,” Addison said, jabbing his pipe in the direction of a road, just visible, tracing through the trees below like a faint, pencil-drawn line. “Down that road is a town, and in that town — in your time, anyway — is a train station. Your medium of inter-loop travel is when — 1940?”

“That’s right,” Emma replied.

Though I only vaguely understood what they were talking about, I’d never been afraid to ask dumb questions. “Why can’t we just go out into this world?” I asked. “Travel to London through whatever year it is here?”

“The only way is by horse and carriage,” said Addison, “which takes several days … and causes considerable chafing, in my experience. I’m afraid you don’t have that much time to spare.” He turned and nosed open the door to the tower’s little shack. “Please,” he said, “there’s one more thing I’d like to show you.”

We followed him inside. The shack was modest and tiny, a far cry from Miss Peregrine’s queenly setup. The entirety of its furniture was a small bed, a wardrobe, and a rolltop desk. A telescope sat mounted on a tripod, aimed out the window: Miss Wren’s lookout station, where she watched for trouble, and the comings and goings of her spy pigeons.

Addison went to the desk. “Should you have any difficulty locating the road,” he said, “there’s a map of the forest in here.”

Emma opened the desk and found the map, an old, yellowed roll of paper. Underneath it was a creased snapshot. It showed a woman in a black sequined shawl with gray-streaked hair worn in a dramatic upsweep. She was standing next to a chicken. At first glance the photo looked like a discard, taken during an off moment when the woman was looking away with her eyes closed, and yet there was something just right about it, too — how the woman’s hair and clothes matched the black-and-white speckle of the chicken’s feathers; how she and the chicken were facing opposite directions, implying some odd connection between them, as if they were speaking without words; dreaming at one another.

This, clearly, was Miss Wren.

Addison saw the photo and seemed to wince. I could tell he was worried for her, much more than he wanted to admit. “Please don’t take this as an endorsement of your suicidal plans,” he said, “but if you should succeed in your mad quest … and should happen to encounter Miss Wren along the way … you might consider … I mean, might you consider …”

“We’ll send her home,” Emma said, and then scratched him on the head. It was a perfectly normal thing to do to a dog, but seemed a strange thing to do to a talking one.

“Dog bless you,” Addison replied.

Then I tried petting him, but he reared up on his hind legs and said, “Do you mind? Keep your hands at bay, sir!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, and in the awkward moment that followed it became obvious that it was time to go.

We climbed down the tower to join our friends, where we exchanged tearful goodbyes with Claire and Fiona under the big shade tree. By now Claire had been given a cushion and blanket to lie on, and like a princess she received us one by one at her makeshift bedside on the ground, extracting promises as we knelt down beside her.

“Promise you’ll come back,” she said to me when it was my turn, “and promise you’ll save Miss Peregrine.”

“I’ll try my best,” I said.

“That isn’t good enough!” she said sternly.

“I’ll come back,” I said. “I promise.”

“And save Miss Peregrine!”

“And save Miss Peregrine,” I repeated, though the words felt empty; the more confident I tried to sound, the less confident I actually felt.

“Good,” she said with a nod. “It’s been awfully nice knowing you, Jacob, and I’m glad you came to stay.”

“Me, too,” I said, and then I got up quickly because her bright, blonde-framed face was so earnest it killed me. She believed, unequivocally, everything we told her: that she and Fiona would be all right here, among these strange animals, in a loop abandoned by its ymbryne. That we’d return for them. I hoped with all my heart that it was more than just theater, staged to make this hard thing we had to do seem possible.

Hugh and Fiona stood off to one side, their hands linked and foreheads touching, saying goodbye in their own quiet way. Finally, we’d all finished with Claire and were ready to go, but no one wanted to disturb them, so we stood watching as Fiona pulled away from Hugh, shook a few seeds from her nest of wild hair, and grew a rose bush heavy with red flowers right where they stood. Hugh’s bees rushed to pollinate it, and while they were occupied — as if she’d done it just so they could have a moment to themselves — Fiona embraced him and whispered something in his ear, and Hugh nodded and whispered something back. When they finally turned and saw all of us looking, Fiona blushed, and Hugh came toward us with his hands jammed in his pockets, his bees trailing behind him, and growled, “Let’s go, show’s over.”

We began our trek down the mountain just as dusk was falling. The animals accompanied us as far as the sheer rock wall.

Olive said to them, “Won’t you all come with us?”

The emu-raffe snorted. “We wouldn’t last five minutes out there! You can at least hope to pass for normal. But one look at me …” She wiggled her forearm-less body. “I’d be shot, stuffed, and mounted in no time.”

Then the dog approached Emma and said, “If I could ask one last thing of you …”

“You’ve been so kind,” she replied. “Anything.”

“Would you mind terribly lighting my pipe? We have no matches here; I haven’t had a real smoke in years.”

Emma obliged him, touching a lit finger to the bowl of his pipe. The dog took a long, satisfied puff and said, “Best of luck to you, peculiar children.”

CHAPTER V

We clung to the swinging net like a tribe of monkeys, bumping clumsily down the rock face while the pulley squealed and the rope creaked. Coming to earth in a knotted pile, we extricated ourselves from its tangles in what could’ve been a lost Three Stooges bit; several times I thought I was free, only to try standing and fall flat on my face again with a cartoonish whump! The dead hollow lay just feet away, its tentacles splayed like starfish arms from beneath the boulder that had crushed it. I almost felt embarrassed for it: that such a fearsome creature had let itself be laid low by the likes of us. Next time — if there was a next time — I didn’t think we’d be so lucky.

We tiptoed around the hollow’s reeking carcass. Charged down the mountain as fast as we could, given the limits of the treacherous path and Bronwyn’s volatile cargo. Once we’d reached flat land we were able to follow our own tracks back through the squishy moss of the forest floor. We found the lake again just as the sun was setting and bats were screeching out of their hidden roosts. They seemed to bear some unintelligible warning from the world of night, crying and circling overhead as we splashed through the shallows toward the stone giant. We climbed up to his mouth and pitched ourselves down his throat, then swam out the back of him into the instantly cooler water and brighter light of midday, September 1940.

The others surfaced around me, squealing and holding their ears, everyone feeling the pressure that accompanied quick temporal shifts.

“It’s like an airplane taking off,” I said, working my jaw to release the air.

“Never flown in an airplane,” said Horace, brushing water from the brim of his hat.

“Or when you’re on the highway and someone rolls down a window,” I said.

“What’s a highway?” asked Olive.

“Forget it.”

Emma shushed us. “Listen!”

In the distance I could hear dogs barking. They seemed far away, but sound traveled strangely in deep woods, and distances could be deceiving. “We’ll have to move quickly,” Emma said. “Until I say different, no one make a sound — and that includes you, headmistress!”

“I’ll throw an exploding egg at the first dog that gets near us,” said Hugh. “That’ll teach them to chase peculiars.”

“Don’t you dare,” said Bronwyn. “Mishandle one egg and you’re liable to set them all off!”

We waded out of the lake and started back through the forest, Millard navigating with Miss Wren’s creased map. After half an hour we came to the dirt road Addison had pointed to from the top of the tower. We stood in the ruts of an old wagon track while Millard studied the map, turning it sideways, squinting at its microscopic markings. I reached into the pocket of my jeans for my phone, thinking I’d call up a map of my own — an old habit — then found myself tapping on a blank rectangle of glass that refused to light up. It was dead, of course: wet, chargeless, and fifty years from the nearest cell tower. My phone was the only thing I owned that had survived our disaster at sea, but it was useless here, an alien object. I tossed it into the woods. Thirty seconds later I felt a pang of regret and ran to retrieve it. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me, I wasn’t quite ready to let it go.

Millard folded his map and announced that the town was to our left — a five- or six-hour walk, at least. “If we want to arrive before dark, we’d better move quickly.”

We hadn’t been walking long when Bronwyn noticed a cloud of dust rising on the road behind us, way in the distance. “Someone’s coming,” she said. “What should we do?”

Millard removed his greatcoat and threw it into the weeds by the side of the road, making himself invisible. “I recommend you make yourselves disappear,” he said, “in whatever limited way you are able.”

We got off the road and crouched behind a screen of brush. The dust cloud expanded, and with it came a clatter of wooden wheels and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. It was a caravan of wagons. When they emerged clanking and rumbling from the dust and began to pass us, I saw Horace gasp and Olive break into a smile. These were not the gray, utilitarian wagons I’d gotten used to seeing on Cairnholm, but like something from a circus, painted every color of the rainbow, sporting ornately carved roofs and doors, pulled by long-maned horses, and driven by men and women whose bodies fluttered with beaded necklaces and bright scarves. Remembering Emma’s stories of performing in traveling sideshows with Miss Peregrine and the others, I turned to her and asked, “Are they peculiar?”

“They’re Gypsies,” she replied.

“Is that good news or bad?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Dunno yet.”

I could see her weighing a decision, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was. The town we were heading for was far away, and these wagons were moving a lot faster than we could ever travel on foot. With wights and dogs hunting us, the extra speed might mean the difference between getting caught and getting away. But we didn’t know who these Gypsies were, or whether we could trust them.

Emma looked at me. “What do you think, should we hitch a ride?”

I looked at the wagons. Looked back at Emma. Thought about how my feet would feel after a six-hour walk in still-wet shoes. “Absolutely,” I said.

Signaling to the others, Emma pointed at the last wagon and mimed running after it. It was shaped like a miniature house, with a little window on each side and a platform that jutted from the back like a porch, probably just wide and deep enough to hold all of us if we squeezed tight together. The wagon was moving fast but not faster than we could sprint, so when it had passed us and we were out of the last driver’s sight, we leapt out of the brush and scurried after it. Emma climbed on first, then held out a hand for the next person. One by one we pulled ourselves up and settled into cramped positions along the wagon’s rear porch, careful to do so quietly lest the driver hear us.

We rode like that for a long time, until our ears rang with the clatter of wagon wheels and our clothes were caked with dust, until the midday sun had wheeled across the sky and dipped behind the trees, which rose up like the walls of a great green canyon on either side of us. I scanned the forest constantly, afraid that at any moment the wights and their dogs would burst out and attack us. But for hours we didn’t see anyone — not a wight, not even another traveler. It was as if we’d arrived in an abandoned country.

Now and then the caravan would stop and we’d all hold our breath, ready to flee or fight, sure we were about to be discovered. We’d send Millard out to investigate, and he would creep down from the wagon only to find that the Gypsies were just stretching their legs or reshoeing a horse, and then we’d start moving again. Eventually I stopped worrying about what would happen if we were discovered. The Gypsies seemed road-weary and harmless. We’d pass as normal and appeal to their pity. We’re just orphans with no home, we’d say. Please, could you spare a morsel of bread? With any luck, they’d give us dinner and escort us to the train station.

It wasn’t long before my theory was put to the test. The wagons pulled abruptly off the road and shuddered to a stop in a small clearing. The dust had hardly settled when a large man came striding around back of our wagon. He wore a flat cap on his head, a caterpillar mustache below his nose, and a grim expression that pulled down the corners of his mouth.

Bronwyn hid Miss Peregrine inside her coat while Emma leapt off the wagon and did her best impression of a pathetic orphan. “Sir, we throw ourselves at your mercy! Our house was hit by a bomb, you see, and our parents are dead, and we’re terribly lost …”

“Shut your gob!” the man boomed. “Get down from there, all of you!” It was a command, not a request, emphasized by the decorative-but-deadly-looking knife balanced in his hand.

We looked at one another, unsure what to do. Should we fight him and run, and probably give away our secret in the process — or play normal for a while longer and wait to see what he does? Then dozens more of them appeared, piling out of their wagons to range around us in a wide circle, many holding knives of their own. We were surrounded, our options dramatically narrowed.

The men were grizzled and sharp-eyed, dressed in dark, heavy-knit clothes built to hide layers of road dust. The women wore bright, flowing dresses, their long hair held back by scarves. Children gathered behind and between them. I tried to square what little I knew about Gypsies with the faces before me. Were they about to massacre us — or were they just naturally grumpy?

I looked to Emma for a cue. She stood with her hands pressed to her chest, not held out like she was about to make flame. If she wasn’t going to fight them, I decided, then neither was I.

I got down from the wagon like the man had asked, hands above my head. Horace and Hugh did the same, and then the others — all but Millard, who had slipped away, unseen, presumably to lurk nearby, waiting and watching.

The man with the cap, whom I’d pegged as their leader, began to fire questions at us. “Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are your elders?”

“We come from the west,” Emma said calmly. “An island off the coast. We’re orphans, as I already explained. Our houses were smashed by bombs in an air raid, and we were forced to flee. We rowed all the way to the mainland and nearly drowned.” She attempted to manufacture some tears. “We have nothing,” she sniffled. “We’ve been lost in the woods for days with no food to eat and no clothes but the ones we have on. We saw your wagons passing but were too frightened to show ourselves. We only wanted to ride as far as the town …”

The man studied her, his frown deepening. “Why were you forced to flee your island after your house was bombed? And why did you run into the woods instead of following the coast?”

Enoch spoke up. “No choice. We were being chased.”

Emma gave him a sharp look that said: Let me do this.

“Chased by who?” asked the leader.

“Bad men,” Emma said.

“Men with guns,” added Horace. “Dressed like soldiers, although they aren’t, really.”

A woman in a bright yellow scarf stepped forward. “If soldiers are after them, they’re trouble we don’t need. Send them away, Bekhir.”

“Or tie them to trees and leave them!” said a rangy-looking man.

“No!” cried Olive. “We have to get to London before it’s too late!”

The leader cocked an eyebrow. “Too late for what?” We hadn’t aroused his pity — only his curiosity. “We’ll do nothing until we find out who you are,” he said, “and what you’re worth.”

Ten men holding long-bladed knives marched us toward a flatbed wagon with a big cage mounted on top of it. Even from a distance I could see that it was something meant for animals, twenty feet by ten, made of thick iron bars.

“You’re not going to lock us in there, are you?” Olive said.

“Just until we sort out what to do with you,” said the leader.

“No, you can’t!” cried Olive. “We have to get to London, and quick!”

“And why’s that?”

“One of us is ill,” said Emma, shooting Hugh a meaningful look. “We need to get him a doctor!”

“You don’t need to go all the way to London for no doctor,” said one of the Gypsy men. “Jebbiah’s a doctor. Ain’t you, Jebbiah?”

A man with scabrous lesions spanning his cheeks stepped forward. “Which one of ye’s ill?”

“Hugh needs a specialist,” said Emma. “He’s got a rare condition. Stinging cough.”

Hugh put a hand to his throat as if it hurt him and coughed, and a bee shot out of his mouth. Some of the Gypsies gasped, and a little girl hid her face in her mother’s skirt.

“It’s some sort of trick!” said the so-called doctor.

“Enough,” said their leader. “Get in the cage, all of you.”

They shoved us toward a ramp that led to it. We clustered together at the bottom. No one wanted to go first.

“We can’t let them do this!” whispered Hugh.

“What are you waiting for?” Enoch hissed at Emma. “Burn them!”

Emma shook her head and whispered, “There are too many.” She led the way up the ramp and into the cage. Its barred ceiling was low, its floor piled deep with rank-smelling hay. When we were all inside, the leader slammed the door and locked it behind us, slipping the key into his pocket. “No one goes near them!” he shouted to anyone within earshot. “They could be witches, or worse.”

“Yes, that’s what we are!” Enoch said through the bars. “Now let us go, or we’ll turn your children into warthogs!”

The leader laughed as he walked away down the ramp. Meanwhile, the other Gypsies retreated to a safe distance and began to set up camp, pitching tents and starting cookfires. We sank down into the hay, feeling defeated and depressed.

“Look out,” Horace warned. “There are animal droppings everywhere!”

“Oh, what does it matter, Horace?” Emma said. “No one gives a chuck if your clothes are dirty!”

“I do,” Horace replied.

Emma covered her face with her hands. I sat down next to her and tried to think of something encouraging to say, but came up blank.

Bronwyn opened her coat to give Miss Peregrine some fresh air, and Enoch knelt beside her and cocked his ear, as if listening for something. “Hear that?” he said.

“What?” Bronwyn replied.

“The sound of Miss Peregrine’s life slipping away! Emma, you should’ve burned those Gypsies’ faces off while you had the chance!”

“We were surrounded!” Emma said. “Some of us would’ve gotten hurt in a big fight. Maybe killed. I couldn’t risk that.”

“So you risked Miss Peregrine instead!” said Enoch.

“Enoch, leave her be,” said Bronwyn. “It ain’t easy, deciding for everyone. We can’t take a vote every time there’s a choice to be made.”

“Then maybe you should let me decide for everyone,” Enoch replied.

Hugh snorted. “We would’ve been killed ages ago if you were in charge.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter now,” I said. “We have to get out of this cage and make it to that town. We’re a lot closer now than if we hadn’t hitched a ride in the first place, so there’s no need to cry over milk that hasn’t even spilled yet. We just need to think of a way to escape.”

So we thought, and came up with lots of ideas, but none that seemed workable.

“Maybe Emma can burn through this floor,” Bronwyn suggested. “It’s made of wood.”

Emma swept a clear patch in the hay and knocked on the floor.

“It’s too thick,” she said miserably.

“Wyn, can you bend these bars apart?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she replied, “but not with those Gypsies so close by. They’ll see and come running with their knives again.”

“We need to sneak out, not break out,” said Emma.

Then we heard a whisper from outside the bars. “Did you forget about me?”

“Millard!” Olive exclaimed, nearly floating out of her shoes with excitement. “Where have you been?”

“Getting the lay of the land, as it were. And waiting for things to calm down.”

“Think you can steal the key for us?” said Emma, rattling the cage’s locked door. “I saw the head man put it in his pocket.”

“Prowling and purloinment are my specialty,” he assured us, and with that he slipped away.

The minutes crawled by. Then a half hour. Then an hour. Hugh paced the length of the cage, an agitated bee circling his head.

“What’s taking him so long?” he grumbled.

“If he doesn’t come back soon, I’m going to start tossing eggs,” said Enoch.

“Do that and you’ll get us all killed,” said Emma. “We’re sitting ducks in here. Once the smoke clears, they’ll flay us alive.”

So we sat and waited more, watching the Gypsies, the Gypsies watching back. Every minute that ticked by felt like another nail in Miss Peregrine’s coffin. I found myself staring at her, as if by looking closely enough I might be able to detect the changes happening to her — to see the still-human spark within her slowly winking out. But she looked the same as she always had, only calmer somehow, asleep in the hay next to Bronwyn, her small, feathered chest rising and falling softly. She seemed to have no awareness of the trouble we were in, or of the countdown that was hanging over her head. Maybe the fact that she could sleep at a time like this was evidence enough that she was changing. The old Miss Peregrine would’ve been having nervous fits.

Then my thoughts strayed to my parents, as they always did when I didn’t keep a tight rein on them. I tried to picture their faces as I’d last seen them. Bits and pieces coalesced in my mind: the thin rim of stubble my dad had developed after a few days on the island; the way my mom, without realizing it, would fiddle with her wedding ring when my dad talked too long about something that disinterested her; my dad’s darting eyes, always checking the horizon on his never-ending search for birds.

Now they’d be searching for me.

As evening settled in, the camp came alive around us. The Gypsies talked and laughed, and when a band of children with battered horns and fiddles struck up a song, they danced. Between songs one of the boys from the band snuck around back of our cage with a bottle in his hands. “It’s for the sick one,” he said, checking behind him nervously.

“Who?” I said, and then he nodded at Hugh, who wilted to the floor in spasms of coughing, right on cue.

The boy slipped the bottle through the bars. I twisted off the cap, gave it a sniff, and nearly fell over. It smelled like turpentine mixed with compost. “What is it?” I said.

“Works, that’s all I know.” He looked behind him again. “All right, I done something for you. Now you owes. So tell me — what crime did you do? You’re thieves, aincha?” Then he lowered his voice and said, “Or didja kill someone?”

“What’s he talking about?” said Bronwyn.

We didn’t kill anyone, I came close to saying, but then an image of Golan’s body tumbling through the air toward a battery of rocks flashed in my mind, and I kept quiet.

Emma said it for me instead. “We didn’t kill anyone!”

“Well, you musta done something,” the boy said. “Why else would they have a reward out for you?”

“There’s a reward?” said Enoch.

“Sure as rain. They’re offering a whole pile of money.”

“Who is?”

The boy shrugged.

“Are you going to turn us in?” Olive asked.

The boy twisted his lip. “Dunno if we will or we won’t. The big shots are chewing it over. Though I’ll say they don’t much trust the sort of people who’s offerin’ the reward. Then again, money’s money, and they don’t much like it that you won’t answer their questions.”

“Where we come from,” Emma said haughtily, “you don’t question people who come to you asking for help.”

“And you don’t put ’em in cages, either!” said Olive.

Just then a tremendous bang went off in the middle of the camp. The Gypsy boy lost his balance and fell off the ramp into the grass, and the rest of us ducked as pots and pans went flying through the air away from a cookfire. The Gypsy woman who’d been tending it sped off screaming bloody murder, her dress on fire, and she might’ve run all the way to the ocean if someone hadn’t picked up a horse’s drinking bucket and doused her with it.

A moment later we heard the footsteps of an invisible boy pounding up the ramp outside our cage. “That’s what happens when you try and make an omelet from a peculiar chicken egg!” said Millard, out of breath and laughing.

“You did that?” said Horace.

“Everything was too orderly and quiet … bad weather for pickpocketing! So I slipped one of our eggs in with theirs, et voilà!” Millard made a key appear out of thin air. “People are much less likely to notice my hand in their pockets when dinner’s just exploded in their faces.”

“Took you long enough,” said Enoch. “Now let us out of here!”

But before Millard could get the key in the door, the Gypsy boy stood up and shouted, “Help! They’re trying to get away!”

The boy had heard everything — but in the confusion following the blast, hardly anyone noticed his shouts.

Millard twisted the key in the lock. The door wouldn’t open.

“Oh, drat,” he said. “Perhaps I stole the wrong key?”

“Ahhhh!” the boy screamed, pointing at the space Millard’s voice emanated from. “A ghost!”

“Will someone please shut him up!” said Enoch.

Bronwyn obliged, reaching through the cage to grab the boy’s arms, then pulling him off his feet and up against the bars.

“Haaaaalp!” he screamed. “They’ve got mmmfff — ”

She slapped a hand over his mouth, but she’d silenced him too late. “Galbi!” a woman shouted. “Let him go, you savages!”

And suddenly, without really meaning to, we’d taken a hostage. Gypsy men rushed at us, knives flashing in the failing light.

“What are you doing?” cried Millard. “Let that boy go before they murder us!”

“No, don’t!” Emma said, and then she screamed, “Free us or the boy dies!”

The Gypsies surrounded us, shouting threats. “If you harm him in any way,” the leader yelled, “I’ll kill every last one of you with my bare hands!”

“Stay back!” Emma said. “Just let us go and we won’t hurt anyone.”

One of the men made a run at the cage, and instinctively, Emma flicked out her hands and sparked a roaring fireball between them. The crowd gasped and the man skidded to a stop.

“Now you’ve done it!” hissed Enoch. “They’ll hang us for being witches!”

“I’ll burn the first one that tries!” Emma shouted, widening the space between her palms to make the fireball even larger. “Come on, let’s show them who they’re messing with!”

It was time to put on a show. Bronwyn went first: with one hand she raised the boy even higher, his feet kicking in the air, and with the other she grabbed one of the roof bars and began to bend it. Horace stuck his face between the bars and shot a line of bees from his open mouth, and then Millard, who’d sprinted away from the cage the moment the boy had noticed him, shouted from somewhere behind the crowd, “And if you think you can contend with them, you haven’t met me!” and launched an egg into the air. It arced above their heads and landed in a nearby clearing with a huge bang, scattering dirt as high as the treetops.

As the smoke cleared, there was a breathless moment in which no one moved or spoke. I thought at first that our display had paralyzed the Gypsies with awe — but then, when the ringing in my ears had faded, I realized they were listening for something. Then I was, too.

From the darkening road came the sound of an engine. A pair of headlights flickered into view beyond the trees, along the road. Everyone, Gypsy and peculiar, watched as the lights passed the turnoff to our clearing — then slowed, then came back. A canvas-topped military vehicle rumbled toward us. From inside it, the sounds of angry voices shouting and dogs, their throats hoarse from barking but unable to stop now that they’d caught our scent again.

It was the wights who’d been hunting us — and here we were inside a cage, unable even to run.

Emma extinguished her flame with a clap of her hands. Bronwyn dropped the boy and he stumbled away. The Gypsies fled back to their wagons or into the woods. In moments we were left alone, seemingly forgotten.

Their leader strode toward us.

“Open the cage!” Emma begged him.

She was ignored. “Hide yourselves under the hay and don’t make a sound!” the man said. “And no magic tricks — unless you’d rather go with them.”

There was no time for more questions. The last thing we saw before everything went black were two Gypsy men running at us with a tarp in their hands. They flipped it over the top of our cage.

Instant night.

Boots tromped by outside the cage, heavy and thudding, as if the wights sought to punish the very ground they walked upon. We did as instructed and dug ourselves into the stinking hay.

Nearby, I heard a wight talking to the Gypsy leader. “A group of children were seen along the road this morning,” the wight said, his voice clipped, accent obscure — not quite English, not quite German. “There’s a reward for their capture.”

“We haven’t run across anyone all day, sir,” the leader said.

“Don’t let their innocent faces fool you. They’re traitors to the war effort. Spies for Germany. The penalty for hiding them …”

“We aren’t hiding anything,” the leader said gruffly. “See for yourself.”

“I’ll do that,” said the wight. “And if we find them here, I’ll cut your tongue out and feed it to my dog.” The wight stomped away.

“Don’t. Even. Breathe,” the leader hissed at us, and then his footsteps trailed away, too.

I wondered why he would lie for us, given the harm these wights could cause his people. Maybe it was out of pride, or some deep-rooted disdain for authority — or, I thought with a cringe, maybe the Gypsies just wanted the satisfaction of killing us themselves.

All around us we could hear the wights spreading throughout the camp, kicking things over, throwing open caravan doors, shoving people. A child screamed and a man reacted angrily, but was cut short with the sound of wood meeting flesh. It was excruciating to lie there and listen to people suffer — even if those same people had been ready to tear us limb from limb just minutes ago.

From the corner of my eye I saw Hugh rise from the hay and crawl to Bronwyn’s trunk. He slipped his fingers over the latch and began to open the lid, but Bronwyn stopped him. “What are you doing?” she mouthed.

“We’ve got to get them before they get us!”

Emma lifted herself out of the hay on her elbows and rolled toward them, and I got closer too, to listen.

“Don’t be insane,” said Emma. “If we throw the eggs now, they’ll shoot us to ribbons.”

“So what, then?” said Hugh. “We should just lie here until they find us?”

We clustered around the trunk, speaking in whispers.

“Wait until they unlock the door,” said Enoch. “Then I’ll throw an egg through the bars behind us. That’ll distract the wights long enough for Bronwyn to crack the skull of whichever one comes into the cage first, which should give the rest of us time to run. Scatter to the outer edges of camp, then turn and throw your eggs back at the middle-most campfire. Everyone in a thirty-meter radius will be a memory.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Hugh. “That just might work.”

“But there are children in the camp!” said Bronwyn.

Enoch rolled his eyes. “Or we can worry about collateral damage, run into the woods, and leave the wights and their dogs to hunt us down one by one. But if we plan on reaching London — or living beyond tonight — I don’t recommend it.”

Hugh patted Bronwyn’s hand, which was covering the trunk latch. “Open it,” he said. “Give them out.”

Bronwyn hesitated. “I can’t. I can’t kill children who’ve done nothing to harm us.”

“But we don’t have a choice!” whispered Hugh.

“You always have a choice,” said Bronwyn.

Then we heard a dog snarl very near the bottom rim of the cage, and went silent. A moment later a flashlight shone against the outside of the tarp. “Tear this sheet down!” someone said — the dog’s handler, I assumed.

The dog barked, its nose snuffling to get beneath the tarp and up through the cage bars. “Over here!” shouted the handler. “We’ve got something!”

We all looked to Bronwyn. “Please,” Hugh said. “At least let us defend ourselves.”

“It’s the only way,” said Enoch.

Bronwyn sighed and took her hand away from the latch. Hugh nodded gratefully and opened the trunk lid. We all reached in and took an egg from between the layered sweaters — everyone but Bronwyn. Then we stood and faced the cage door, eggs in hand, and prepared for the inevitable.

More boots marched toward us. I tried to prepare myself for what was coming. Run, I told myself. Run and don’t look back and then throw it.

But knowing that innocent people would die, could I really do it? Even to save my own life? What if I just dropped the egg in some grass and ran into the woods?

A hand grabbed one edge of the tarp and pulled. The tarp began to slide away.

Then, just shy of exposing us, it stopped.

“What’s the matter with you?” I heard the dog’s handler say.

“I’d steer well away from that cage if I was you,” said another voice — a Gypsy’s.

I could see half the sky above us, stars twinkling down through the branches of oaks.

“Yeah? And why is that?” said the handler.

“Old Bloodcoat ain’t been fed in a few days,” the Gypsy said.

“He don’t usually care for the taste of humans, but when he’s this hungry he ain’t so discriminating!”

Then came a sound that stole the breath right out of me — the roar of a giant bear. Impossibly, it seemed to be coming from among us, inside our cage. I heard the dog’s handler shout in surprise and then scramble down the ramp, pulling his yelping dog along with him.

I couldn’t fathom how a bear had gotten into the cage, only that I needed to get away from it, so I pressed myself hard against the bars. Next to me I saw Olive stick her little fist in her mouth to keep from crying out.

Outside, other soldiers were laughing at the handler. “Idiot!” he said, embarrassed. “Only Gypsies would keep an animal like that in the middle of their camp!”

I finally worked up the courage to turn around and look behind me. There was no bear in our cage. What had made that awful roar?

The soldiers kept searching the camp, but now they left our cage alone. After a few minutes we heard them pile back into their truck and restart the engine, and then, at last, they were gone.

The tarp slid away from our cage. The Gypsies were all gathered around us. I held my egg in one trembling hand, wondering if I’d have to use it.

The leader stood before us. “Are you all right?” he said. “I’m sorry if that frightened you.”

“We’re alive,” Emma replied, looking around warily. “But where’s this bear of yours?”

“You aren’t the only ones with unusual talents,” said a young man at the edge of the crowd, and then in quick succession he growled like a bear and yowled like a cat, throwing his voice from one place to another with slight turns of his head so that it sounded like we were being stalked from all directions. When we’d gotten over our shock, we broke into applause.

“I thought you said they weren’t peculiar,” I whispered to Emma.

“Anyone can do parlor tricks like that,” she said.

“Apologies if I failed to properly introduce myself,” said the Gypsy leader. “My name is Bekhir Bekhmanatov. And you are our honored guests.” He bowed deeply. “Why didn’t you tell us you were syndrigasti?”

We gaped at him. He had used the ancient name for peculiars, the one Miss Peregrine had taught us.

“Do we know you from somewhere?” Bronwyn asked.

“Where did you hear that word?” said Emma.

Bekhir smiled. “If you’ll accept our hospitality, I promise to explain everything.” Then he bowed again and strode forward to unlock our cage.

We sat with the Gypsies on fine, handwoven carpets, talking and eating stew by the shimmering light of twin campfires. I dropped the spoon I’d been given and slurped straight from a wooden bowl, my table manners a distant memory as greasy, delicious broth dribbled down my chin. Bekhir walked among us, making sure each peculiar child was comfortable, asking if we had enough to eat and drink, and apologizing repeatedly for the state of our clothes, now covered in filthy bits of hay from the cage. Since witnessing our peculiar display he’d changed his attitude toward us completely; in the span of a few minutes we’d graduated from being prisoners to guests of honor.

“I’m very sorry for the way you were treated,” he said, lowering himself onto a cushion between the fires. “When it comes to the safety of my people, I must take every precaution. There are many strangers wandering the roads these days — people who aren’t what they appear to be. If you’d only told me you were syndrigasti …”

“We were taught never, ever to tell anyone,” said Emma.

“Ever,” Olive added.

“Whoever taught you that is very wise,” Bekhir said.

“How do you know about us?” Emma asked. “You speak the old tongue.”

“Only a few words,” Bekhir said. He gazed into the flames, a spit of darkening meat roasting there. “We have an old understanding, your people and mine. We aren’t so different. Outcasts and wanderers all — souls clinging to the margins of the world.” He pinched a hunk of meat from the spit and chewed it thoughtfully. “We are allies of a sort. Over the years, we Gypsies have even taken in and raised some of your children.”

“And we’re grateful for it,” said Emma, “and for your hospitality as well. But at the risk of seeming rude, we can’t possibly stay with you any longer. It’s very important that we reach London quickly. We have a train to catch.”

“For your sick friend?” Bekhir asked, raising an eyebrow at Hugh, who had long ago dropped his act and was now gulping down stew with abandon, bees buzzing happily around his head.

“Something like that,” said Emma.

Bekhir knew we were hiding something, but he was kind enough to let us have our secrets. “There won’t be any more trains tonight,” he said, “but we’ll rise at dawn and deliver you to the station before the first one leaves in the morning. Good enough?”

“It’ll have to be,” Emma said, her brow pinched with worry. Even though we’d saved time by hitching a ride instead of walking, Miss Peregrine had still lost an entire day. Now she had only two left, at most. But that was in the future; right now we were warm, well fed, and out of immediate danger. It was hard not to enjoy ourselves, if only for the moment.

We made fast friends with the Gypsies. Everyone was eager to forget what had happened between us earlier. Bronwyn tried to apologize to the boy she’d taken hostage, but he brushed it off like it had been nothing. The Gypsies fed us relentlessly, refilling my bowl again and again — overfilling it when I tried to refuse more. When Miss Peregrine hopped out of Bronwyn’s coat and announced her appetite with a screech, the Gypsies fed her, too, tossing hunks of raw meat in the air and cheering when she leapt up to snatch them. “She’s hungry!” Olive laughed, clapping as the bird shredded a pig knuckle with her talons.

“Now aren’t you glad we didn’t blow them up?” Bronwyn whispered to Enoch.

“Oh, I suppose,” he replied.

The Gypsy band struck up another song. We ate and danced. I convinced Emma to take a turn around the fire with me, and though I was usually shy about dancing in public, this time I let myself go. Our feet flew and our hands clapped in time to the music, and for a few shining minutes we lost ourselves in it. I was able to forget how much danger we were in, and how that very day we had nearly been captured by wights and devoured by a hollow, our meat-stripped bones spat off a mountainside. In that moment I was deeply grateful to the Gypsies, and for the simplemindedness of the animal part of my brain; that a hot meal and a song and a smile from someone I cared about could be enough to distract me from all that darkness, if only for a little while. Then the song ended and we stumbled back to our seats, and in the lull that followed I felt the mood change. Emma looked at Bekhir and said, “May I ask you something?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Why did you risk your lives for us?”

He waved his hand. “You would’ve done the same.”

“I’m not sure we would’ve,” said Emma. “I just want to understand. Was it because we’re peculiar?”

“Yes,” he said simply. A moment passed. He looked away at the trees that edged our clearing, their firelit trunks and the blackness beyond. Then he said, “Would you like to meet my son?”

“Of course,” Emma said.

She stood, and so did I and several others.

Bekhir raised a hand. “He’s shy, I’m afraid. Just you,” he said, pointing to Emma, “and you”—he pointed at me — “and the one who can be heard but not seen.”

“Impressive,” said Millard. “And I was trying so hard to be subtle!”

Enoch sat down again. “Why am I always being left out of things? Do I smell?”

A Gypsy woman in a flowing robe swept into the campfire circle. “While they’re gone, I’ll read your palms and tell your fortunes,” she said. She turned to Horace. “Maybe you’ll climb Kilimanjaro one day!” Then to Bronwyn — “Or marry a rich, handsome man!”

Bronwyn snorted. “My fondest dream.”

“The future is my specialty, madam,” said Horace. “Let me show you how it’s done!”

Emma, Millard, and I left them and started across the camp with Bekhir. We came to a plain-looking caravan wagon, and he climbed its short ladder and knocked on the door.

“Radi?” he called gently. “Come out, please. There are people here to see you.”

The door opened a crack and a woman peeked out. “He’s scared. Won’t leave his chair.” She looked us over carefully, then opened the door wide and beckoned us in. We mounted the steps and ducked into a cramped but cozy space that appeared to be a living room, bedroom, and kitchen all in one. There was a bed under a narrow window, a table and chair, and a little stove that vented out a chimney in the roof; everything you’d need to be self-sufficient on the road for weeks or months at a time.

In the room’s lone chair sat a boy. He held a trumpet in his lap. I’d seen him play earlier, I realized, as part of the Gypsy children’s band. This was Bekhir’s son, and the woman, I assumed, was Bekhir’s wife.

“Take off your shoes, Radi,” the woman said.

The boy kept his gaze trained on the floor. “Do I have to?” he asked.

“Yes,” Bekhir said.

The boy tugged off one of his boots, then the other. For a second I wasn’t sure what I was seeing: there was nothing inside his shoes. He appeared to have no feet. And yet he’d had to work to get his boots off, so they had to have been attached to something. Then Bekhir asked him to stand, and reluctantly the boy slid forward in the chair and rose out of it. He seemed to be levitating, the cuffs of his pants hanging empty a few inches above the floor.

“He began disappearing a few months ago,” the woman explained. “First just his toes. Then his heels. Finally the rest, both feet. Nothing I’ve given him — no tincture, no tonic — has had the slightest effect in curing him.”

So he had feet, after all — invisible ones.

“We don’t know what to do,” said Bekhir. “But I thought, perhaps there’s a healer among you …”

“There’s no healing what he’s got,” said Millard, and at the sound of his voice in the empty air the boy’s head jerked up. “We’re alike, he and I. It was just the same for me when I was young. I wasn’t born invisible; it happened a little at a time.”

“Who’s speaking?” the boy said.

Millard picked up a scarf that lay on the edge of the bed and wrapped it around his face, revealing the shape of his nose, his forehead, his mouth. “Here I am,” he said, moving across the floor toward the boy. “Don’t be frightened.”

As the rest of us watched, the boy reached up his hand and touched Millard’s cheek, then his forehead, then his hair — the color and style of which it had never occurred to me to imagine — and even pulled a little hank of it, gently, as if testing its realness.

“You’re there,” the boy said, his eyes sparkling with wonder. “You’re really there!”

“And you’ll be, too, even after the rest of you goes,” said Millard. “You’ll see. It doesn’t hurt.”

The boy smiled, and when he did, the woman’s knees wobbled and she had to steady herself against Bekhir. “Bless you,” she said to Millard, near tears. “Bless you.”

Millard sat down at Radi’s disappeared feet. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, my boy. In fact, once you adjust to invisibility, I think you’ll find it has many advantages …”

And as he began to list them, Bekhir went to the door and nodded at Emma and me. “Let’s let them be,” he said. “I’m sure they have a lot to talk about.”

We left Millard alone with the boy and his mother. Returning to the campfire, we found nearly everyone, peculiar and Gypsy alike, gathered around Horace. He was standing on a tree stump before the astounded fortune teller, his eyes closed and one hand atop her head, and seemed to be narrating a dream as it came to him: “… and your grandson’s grandson will pilot a giant ship that shuttles between the Earth and the moon like an omnibus, and on the moon he’ll have a very small house, and he’ll fall behind on the mortgage and have to take in lodgers, and one of those lodgers will be a beautiful woman with whom he’ll fall very deeply in moon-love, which isn’t quite the same as Earth-love because of the difference in gravity there …”

We watched from the edge of the crowd. “Is he for real?” I asked Emma.

“Might be,” she replied. “Or he might just be having a bit of fun with her.”

“Why can’t he tell our futures like that?”

Emma shrugged. “Horace’s ability can be maddeningly useless. He’ll reel off lifetimes of predictions for strangers, but with us he’s almost totally blocked. It’s as if the more he cares about someone, the less he can see. Emotion clouds his vision.”

“Doesn’t it all of us,” came a voice from behind us, and we turned to see Enoch standing there. “And on that tip, I hope you aren’t distracting the American too much, Emma dear. It’s hard to keep a lookout for hollowgast when there’s a young lady’s tongue in your ear.”

“Don’t be disgusting!” Emma said.

“I couldn’t ignore the Feeling if I wanted to,” I said, though I did wish I could ignore the icky feeling that Enoch was jealous of me.

“So, tell me about your secret meeting,” Enoch said. “Did the Gypsies really protect us because of some dusty old alliance none of us have heard of?”

“The leader and his wife have a peculiar son,” said Emma. “They hoped we could help him.”

“That’s madness,” said Enoch. “They nearly let themselves be filleted alive by those soldiers for the sake of one boy? Talk about emotion clouding vision! I figured they wanted to enslave us for our abilities, or at the very least sell us at auction — but then I’m always overestimating people.”

“Oh, go find a dead animal to play with,” said Emma.

“I’ll never understand ninety-nine percent of humanity,” said Enoch, and he went away shaking his head.

“Sometimes I think that boy is part machine,” Emma said. “Flesh on the outside, metal on the inside.”

I laughed, but secretly I wondered if Enoch was right. Was it crazy, what Bekhir had risked for his son? Because if Bekhir was crazy, then certainly I was. How much had I given up for the sake of just one girl? Despite my curiosity, despite my grandfather, despite the debts we owed Miss Peregrine, ultimately I was here — now — for one reason alone: because from the day I met Emma I’d known I wanted to be part of any world she belonged to. Did that make me crazy? Or was my heart too easily conquered?

Maybe I could use a little metal on the inside, I thought. If I’d kept my heart better armored, where would I be now?

Easy — I’d be at home, medicating myself into a monotone. Drowning my sorrows in video games. Working shifts at Smart Aid. Dying inside, day by day, from regret.

You coward. You weak, pathetic child. You threw your chance away.

But I hadn’t. In reaching toward Emma, I’d risked everything — was risking it again, every day — but in doing so I had grasped and pulled myself into a world once unimaginable to me, where I lived among people who were more alive than anyone I’d known, did things I’d never dreamed I could do, survived things I’d never dreamed I could survive. All because I’d let myself feel something for one peculiar girl.

Despite all the trouble and danger we found ourselves in, and despite the fact that this strange new world had started to crumble the moment I’d discovered it, I was profoundly glad I was here. Despite everything, this peculiar life was what I’d always wanted. Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.

“What is it?” Emma said. “You’re staring at me.”

“I wanted to thank you,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose and squinted like I’d said something funny. “Thank me for what?” she said.

“You give me strength I didn’t know I had,” I said. “You make me better.”

She blushed. “I don’t know what to say.”

Emma, bright soul. I need your fire — the one inside you.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said. And then I was seized with the sudden urge to kiss her, and I did.

Though we were dead tired, the Gypsies were in a buoyant mood and seemed determined to keep the party going, and after a few cups of hot, sweet, highly caffeinated something and a few more songs, they’d won us over. They were natural storytellers and beautiful singers; innately charming people who treated us like long-lost cousins. We stayed up half the night trading stories. The young guy who’d thrown his voice like a bear did a ventriloquist act that was so good I almost believed his dummies had come alive. He seemed to have a little crush on Emma and delivered the whole routine to her, smiling encouragingly, but she pretended not to notice and made a point of holding my hand.

Later they told us the story of how, during the First World War, the British army had taken all their horses, and for a while they’d had none to pull their wagons. They had been left stranded in the forest — this very forest — when one day a herd of long-horned goats wandered into their camp. They looked wild but were tame enough to eat out of your hand, so someone got the idea to hitch one to a wagon, and these goats turned out to be nearly as strong as the horses they’d lost. So the Gypsies got unstuck, and until the end of the war their wagons were pulled by these peculiarly strong goats, which is how they became known throughout Wales as Goat People. As proof they passed around a photo of Bekhir’s uncle riding a goat-pulled wagon. We knew without anyone having to say it that this was the lost herd of peculiar goats Addison had talked about. After the war, the army gave back the Gypsies’ horses, and the goats, no longer needed, disappeared again into the forest.

Finally, campfires dwindling, they laid out sleeping rolls for us and sang a lullaby in a lilting foreign language, and I felt pleasantly like a child. The ventriloquist came to say good night to Emma. She shooed him away, but not before he left a calling card. On the back was an address in Cardiff where he picked up mail every few months, whenever the Gypsies stopped through. On the front was his photo, with dummies, and a little note written to Emma. She showed it to me and snickered, but I felt bad for the guy. He was guilty only of liking her, same as me.

I curled up with Emma in a sleeping roll at the forest’s edge. Just as we were drifting off, I heard footsteps in the grass nearby, and opened my eyes to see no one at all. It was Millard, back again after having spent the evening talking with the Gypsy boy.

“He wants to come with us,” said Millard.

“Who?” Emma mumbled groggily. “Where?”

“The boy. With us.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told him it was a bad idea. But I didn’t say no, precisely.”

“You know we can’t take on anyone else,” Emma said. “He’ll slow us down.”

“I know, I know,” said Millard. “But he’s disappearing very rapidly, and he’s frightened. Soon he’ll be entirely invisible, and he’s afraid he’ll fall behind their group one day and the Gypsies won’t notice and he’ll be lost forever in the woods among the wolves and spiders.”

Emma groaned and rolled over to face Millard. He wasn’t going to let us sleep until this was decided. “I know he’ll be disappointed,” she said. “But it’s really impossible. I’m sorry, Mill.”

“Fair enough,” Millard said heavily. “I’ll give him the news.”

He rose and slipped away.

Emma sighed, and for a while she tossed and turned, restless.

“You did the right thing,” I whispered. “It isn’t easy being the one everybody looks to.”

She said nothing, but snuggled into the hollow of my chest. Gradually we drifted off, the whispers of breeze-blown branches and the breathing of horses gentling us to sleep.

It was a night of thin sleep and bad dreams, spent much as I’d spent the previous day: being chased by packs of nightmare dogs. By morning I was worn out. My limbs felt heavy as wood, my head cottony. I might’ve felt better if I hadn’t slept at all.

Bekhir woke us at dawn. “Rise and shine, syndrigasti!” he shouted, tossing out hunks of brick-hard bread. “There’ll be time for sleeping when you’re dead!”

Enoch knocked his bread against a rock and it clacked like wood. “We’ll be dead soon enough, with breakfast like this!”

Bekhir roughed Enoch’s hair, grinning. “Ahh, come on. Where’s your peculiar spirit this morning?”

“In the wash,” said Enoch, covering his head with the sleeping roll.

Bekhir gave us ten minutes to prepare for the ride to town. He was making good on his promise and would have us there before the morning’s first train. I got up, stumbled to a bucket of water, splashed some on my face, brushed my teeth with my finger. Oh, how I missed my toothbrush. How I longed for my minty floss, my ocean-breeze-scented deodorant stick. What I wouldn’t have given, just then, to find a Smart Aid store.

My kingdom for a pack of fresh underwear!

As I raked bits of hay from my hair with my fingers and bit into a loaf of inedible bread, the Gypsies and their children watched us with mournful faces. It was as if they knew, somehow, that the previous night’s fun had been a last hurrah, and now we were being led off to the gallows. I tried to cheer one of them up. “It’s okay,” I said to a towheaded little boy who seemed on the verge of tears. “We’re going to be fine.”

He looked at me as if I were a talking ghost, his eyes wide and uncertain.

Eight horses were rounded up, and eight Gypsy riders — one for each of us. Horses would get us to town much faster than a caravan of wagons could. They were also terrifying to me.

I’d never ridden a horse. I was probably the only marginally rich kid in America who hadn’t. It wasn’t because I didn’t think horses were beautiful, majestic creatures, the pinnacle of animal creation, etc., etc. — it’s just that I didn’t believe any animal had the slightest interest in being mounted or ridden by a human being. Besides, horses were very large, with rippling muscles and big, grinding teeth, and they looked at me as if they knew I was afraid and were hoping for an opportunity to kick my head in. Not to mention the lack of a seatbelt on a horse — no secondary restraint systems of any kind — and yet horses could go nearly as fast as cars but were much bouncier. So the whole endeavor just seemed inadvisable.

I said none of this, of course. I shut up and set my jaw and hoped I’d live at least long enough to die in a more interesting way than by falling off a horse.

From the first giddyap! we were at full gallop. I abandoned my dignity right away and bear-hugged the Gypsy man on the saddle in front of me who held the reins — so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to wave goodbye to the Gypsies who had gathered to see us off. Which was just as well: goodbyes had never been my strong suit anyway, and lately my life had felt like an unbroken series of them. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

We rode. My thighs went numb from squeezing the horse. Bekhir led the pack, his peculiar boy riding with him in the saddle. The boy rode with his back straight and arms at his sides, confident and unafraid, such a contrast from last night. He was in his element here, among the Gypsies. He didn’t need us. These were his people.

Eventually we slowed to a trot and I found the courage to un-bury my face from the rider’s jacket and take in the changing landscape. The forest had flattened into fields. We were descending into a valley, in the middle of which was a town that, from here, looked no bigger than a postage stamp, overwhelmed by green on all sides. Tracing toward it from the north was a long ellipsis of puffy white dots: the smoky breath of a train.

Bekhir stopped the horses just shy of the town gates. “This is as far as we go,” he said. “We’re not much welcome in towns. You don’t want the sort of attention we’d draw.”

It was hard to imagine anyone objecting to these kindly people. Then again, similar prejudices were among the reasons peculiars had withdrawn from society. Such was the way the sad world turned.

The children and I dismounted. I stood behind the others, hoping no one would notice my trembling legs. Just as we were about to go, Bekhir’s boy sprang down from his father’s horse and cried, “Wait! Take me with you!”

“I thought you were going to talk to him,” Emma said to Millard.

“I did,” Millard replied.

The boy pulled a knapsack from the saddlebag and slung it over his shoulder. He was packed and ready to go. “I can cook,” he said, “and chop wood, and ride a horse, and tie all sorts of knots!”

“Someone give him a merit badge,” said Enoch.

“I’m afraid it’s impossible,” Emma said to him gently.

“But I’m like you — and becoming more so all the time!” The boy began to unbuckle his pants. “Look what’s happening to me!”

Before anyone could stop him, he’d sent his pants to his ankles. The girls gasped and looked away. Hugh shouted, “Keep your trousers on, you depraved lunatic!”

But there was nothing to see — he was invisible from the mid-section down. Morbid curiosity compelled me to peek at the underside of his visible half, which earned me a crystal-clear view of the inner workings of his bowels.

“Look how much I’ve disappeared since yesterday,” Radi said, his voice panicky. “Soon I’ll be gone altogether!”

The Gypsy men gawked and murmured. Even their horses seemed disturbed, shying away from what seemed to be a disembodied child.

“I’ll be winged!” said Enoch. “He’s only half there.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” said Bronwyn. “Can’t we keep him?”

“We aren’t some traveling circus you can join whenever the notion takes you,” said Enoch. “We’re on a dangerous mission to save our ymbryne, and in no position to play babysitter to a clueless new peculiar!”

The boy’s eyes grew wide and began to water, and he let his knapsack slide off his shoulder and fall to the road.

Emma took Enoch aside. “That was too harsh,” she said. “Now tell him you’re sorry.”

“I won’t. This is a ridiculous waste of our precious and dwindling time.”

“These people saved our lives!”

“Our lives wouldn’t have needed saving if they hadn’t stuck us in that blessed cage!”

Emma gave up on Enoch and turned to the boy. “If circumstances were different, we’d welcome you with open arms. But as it stands, our entire civilization and way of life are in danger of being snuffed out. So it’s rather bad timing, you see.”

“It isn’t fair,” the boy moped. “Why couldn’t I have started disappearing ages ago? Why did it have to happen now?”

“Every peculiar’s ability manifests in its own time,” said Millard. “Some in infancy; others not until they’re quite old. I once heard of a man who didn’t realize he could levitate objects with his mind until he was ninety-two years of age.”

“I was lighter than air from the minute I was born,” Olive said proudly. “I popped out of me mum and floated straight up to the hospital ceiling! Only thing that stopped me from rolling out the window and into the clouds was the umbilical cord. They say the doctor fainted from the shock!”

“You’re still quite shocking, love,” Bronwyn said, giving her a reassuring pat on the back.

Millard, visible thanks to the coat and boots he wore, went to the boy. “What does your father think about all of this?” he said.

“Naturally, we don’t want him to go,” Bekhir said, “but how can we properly care for our son if we can’t even see him? He wants to leave — and I wonder if perhaps he’d be better off among his own kind.”

“Do you love him?” Millard asked bluntly. “Does he love you?”

Bekhir’s brow furrowed. He was a man of traditional sensibilities, and the question made him uncomfortable. But after some hemming and hawing, he growled, “Of course. He’s my child.”

“Then you are his kind,” said Millard. “The boy belongs with you, not us.”

Bekhir was loath to show emotion in front of his men, but at this I saw his eyes flicker and his jaw tighten. He nodded, looked down at his son, and said, “Come on, then. Pick up your bag and let’s go. Your mother’ll have tea waiting.”

“All right, Papa,” the boy said, seeming at once disappointed and relieved.

“You’ll be fine,” Millard assured the boy. “Better than fine. And when this is all over, I’ll look for you. There are more like us out there, and we’ll find them one day, together.”

“Promise?” the boy said, his eyes full of hope.

“I do,” said Millard.

And with that the boy climbed back onto his father’s horse, and we turned and walked through the gates into town.

CHAPTER VI

The town was named Coal. Not Coaltown or Coalville. Just Coal. The stuff was everywhere, piled in gritty drifts by the side doors of houses, wafting up from the chimneys as oily smoke, smeared on the overalls of men walking to work. We hurried past them toward the depot in a tight pack.

“Quickly now,” Emma said. “No talking. Eyes down.”

It was a well-established rule that we were to avoid unnecessary eye contact with normals, because looks could lead to conversations, and conversations to questions, and peculiar children found questions posed by normal adults difficult to answer in a way that didn’t invite still more questions. Of course, if anything was going to invite questions, it was a group of bedraggled-looking children traveling alone during wartime — especially with a big, sharp-taloned bird of prey perched on one of the girls’ shoulders — but the townspeople hardly seemed to notice us. They haunted the laundry lines and pub doorways of Coal’s twisting lanes, drooping like wilted flowers, eyes flicking toward us and away again. They had other worries.

The train depot was so small I wondered if trains ever bothered stopping there. The only covered portion was the ticket counter, a little hut in the middle of an open-air platform. Inside the hut was a man asleep in a chair, bottle-thick bifocals slipping down his nose.

Emma rapped sharply on the window, startling the clerk awake. “Eight tickets to London!” she said. “We must be there this very afternoon.”

The clerk peered at us through the glass. Took off his bifocals and wiped them clean and put them on again, just to make sure he was seeing properly. I’m sure we were a shocking sight: our clothes were mud-splotched, our hair greasy and sticking up at odd angles. We probably stank, too.

“So sorry,” the clerk said. “The train is full.”

I looked around. Aside from a few people dozing on benches, the depot was empty.

“That’s absurd!” said Emma. “Sell us the tickets at once or I shall report you to the rail authority for child discrimination!”

I might’ve handled the clerk with a softer touch, but Emma had no patience for the self-important authority of petty bureaucrats.

“If there were any such statute,” the clerk replied, his nose rising disdainfully, “it would certainly not apply to you. There’s a war on, you know, and more important things to be hauled about her majesty’s countryside than children and animals!” He gave Miss Peregrine a hard look. “Which aren’t allowed in any case!”

A train hissed into the station and squealed to a stop. The conductor stuck his head out of one of its windows and shouted, “Eight-thirty to London! All aboard!” The bench-sleepers in the depot roused themselves and began to shuffle across the platform.

A man in a gray suit shoved past us to the window. He pushed money at the clerk, received a ticket in exchange, and hurried off toward the train.

“You said it was full!” Emma said, rapping hard on the glass. “You can’t do that!”

“That gentleman bought a first-class ticket,” the clerk said.

“Now be gone with you, pestilent little beggars! Go find pockets to pick somewhere else!”

Horace stepped to the ticket window and said, “Beggars, by definition, do not carry large sums of money,” and then he reached into his coat pocket and slapped a fat wad of bills down on the counter. “If it’s first-class tickets you’re selling, then that’s what we’ll have!”

The clerk sat up straight, gaping at the pile of money. The rest of us gaped too, baffled as to where Horace had gotten it. Riffling through the bills, the clerk said, “Why, this is enough to buy seats to an entire first-class car!”

“Then give us an entire car!” said Horace. “That way you can be sure we’ll pick no one’s pocket.”

The clerk turned red and stammered, “Y-yes sir — sorry, sir — and I hope you won’t take my previous comments as anything other than jest …”

“Just give us the blasted tickets so we can get on the train!”

“Right away, sir!”

The clerk slid a stack of first-class tickets toward us. “Enjoy your trip!” he said. “And please don’t tell anyone I said so, sirs and madams, but if I were you, I’d hide that bird out of sight. The conductors won’t like it, first-class tickets or not.”

As we strode away from the counter with tickets in hand, Horace’s chest puffed out like a peacock’s.

“Where on earth did you get all that money?” said Emma.

“I rescued it from Miss Peregrine’s dresser drawer before the house burned,” Horace replied. “Tailored a special pocket in my coat to keep it safe.”

“Horace, you’re a genius!” said Bronwyn.

“Would a real genius have given away every cent of our money like that?” said Enoch. “Did we really need an entire first-class car?”

“No,” said Horace, “but making that man look stupid felt good, didn’t it?”

“I suppose it did,” Enoch said.

“That’s because the true purpose of money is to manipulate others and make them feel lesser than you.”

“I’m not entirely sure about that,” Emma said.

“Only kidding!” said Horace. “It’s to buy clothes, of course.”

We were about to board the train when the conductor stopped us. “Let’s see your tickets!” he said, and he was reaching for the stack in Horace’s hand when he noticed Bronwyn stuffing something into her coat. “What’s that you’ve got there?” the conductor said, rounding on her suspiciously.

“What’s what I’ve got where?” Bronwyn replied, trying to seem casual while holding her coat closed over a wriggling lump.

“In your coat there!” the conductor said. “Don’t toy with me, girl.”

“It’s, ahhh …” Bronwyn tried to think fast and failed. “A bird?”

Emma’s head fell. Enoch put a hand over his eyes and groaned.

“No pets on the train!” the conductor barked.

“But you don’t understand,” said Bronwyn. “I’ve had her ever since I was a child … and we must get on this train … and we paid so much for our tickets!”

“Rules are rules!” the conductor said, his patience fraying.

“Do not toy with me!”

Emma’s head bopped up, her face brightening. “A toy!” she said.

“Excuse me?” said the conductor.

“It isn’t a real bird, conductor sir. We’d never dream of breaking the rules like that. It’s my sister’s favorite toy, you see, and she thinks you mean to take it away from her.” She clasped her hands pitifully, imploring. “You wouldn’t take away a child’s favorite toy, would you?”

The conductor studied Bronwyn doubtfully. “She looks too old for toys, wouldn’t you say?”

Emma leaned in and whispered, “She’s a bit delayed, you see …”

Bronwyn frowned at this but had no choice but to play along. The conductor stepped toward her. “Let’s see this toy, then.”

Moment of truth. We held our breath as Bronwyn opened her coat, reached inside, and slowly withdrew Miss Peregrine. When I saw the bird, I thought for one terrible moment that she had died. Miss Peregrine had gone completely stiff, and lay in Bronwyn’s hand with her eyes closed and legs sticking out rigidly. Then I realized she was just playing along.

“See?” Bronwyn said. “Birdy ain’t real. She’s stuffed.”

“I saw it moving earlier!” the conductor said.

“It’s a — ehm — a wind-up model,” said Bronwyn. “Watch.”

Bronwyn knelt down and set Miss Peregrine on the ground on her side, then reached under her wing and pretended to wind something. A moment later Miss Peregrine’s eyes flew open and she began to toddle around, her head swiveling mechanically and legs kicking out as if spring-loaded. Finally she jerked to a stop and toppled over, stiff as a board. Truly an Oscar-worthy performance.

The conductor seemed almost — but not quite — convinced.

“Well,” he hemmed, “if it’s a toy, you won’t mind putting it away in your toy chest.” He nodded at the trunk, which Bronwyn had set down on the platform.

Bronwyn hesitated. “It isn’t a — ”

“Yes, fine, that’s no bother,” said Emma, flipping open the trunk’s latches. “Put it away now, sister!”

“But what if there’s no air in there?” Bronwyn hissed at Emma.

“Then we’ll poke some blessed holes in the side of it!” Emma hissed back.

Bronwyn picked up Miss Peregrine and set her gently inside the trunk. “Ever so sorry, ma’am,” she whispered, lowering and then latching the lid.

The conductor finally took our tickets. “First class!” he said, surprised. “Your car’s all the way down front.” He pointed to the far end of the platform. “You’d best hurry!”

“Now he tells us!” said Emma, and we took off down the platform at a jog.

With a chug of steam and a metallic groan, the train began to move beside us. For now it was just inching along, but with each turn of its wheels it sped up a little more.

We came even with the first-class car. Bronwyn was first to jump through the open door. She set her trunk down in the aisle and reached out a hand to help Olive on board.

Then, from behind us, a voice shouted, “Stop! Get away from there!”

It wasn’t the conductor’s voice. This one was deeper, more authoritative.

“I swear,” Enoch said, “if one more person tries to stop us getting on this train …”

A gunshot rang out, and the sudden shock of it made my feet tangle. I stumbled out the doorway and back onto the platform.

“I said stop!” the voice bellowed again, and looking over my shoulder I saw a uniformed soldier standing on the platform, his knees bent in firing stance, rifle aimed at us. With a pair of loud cracks he volleyed two more bullets over our heads, just to drive his point home. “Off the train and on your knees!” he said, striding toward us.

I thought of making a run for it, but then I caught a glimpse of the soldier’s eyes, and their bulging, pupil-less whites convinced me not to. He was a wight, and I knew he wouldn’t think twice about shooting any one of us. Better not to give him an excuse.

Bronwyn and Olive must’ve been thinking along the same lines, because they got off the train and dropped to their knees alongside the rest of us.

So close, I thought. We were so close.

The train pulled out of the station without us, our best hope for saving Miss Peregrine steaming away into the distance.

And Miss Peregrine with it, I realized with a queasy jolt. Bronwyn had left her trunk on board the train! Something automatic took hold of me and I leapt up to chase down the train — but then the barrel of a rifle appeared just inches from my face, and I felt all the power drain from my muscles in an instant.

“Not. Another. Step,” the soldier said.

I sank back to the ground.

We were on our knees, hands up, hearts hammering. The soldier circled us, tense, his rifle aimed and his finger on its trigger. It was the closest, longest look I’d gotten at a wight since Dr. Golan. He had on a standard-issue British army uniform — khaki shirt tucked into wool pants, black boots, helmet — but he wore them awkwardly, the pants crooked and the helmet seated too far back on his head, like a costume he wasn’t used to wearing yet. He seemed nervous, too, his head cocking this way and that as he sized us up. He was outnumbered, and though we were just a bunch of unarmed children, we’d been responsible for the death of one wight and two hollowgast in the last three days. He was scared of us, and that, more than anything else, made me scared of him. His fear made him unpredictable.

He pulled a radio from his belt and chattered into it. There was a burst of static, and then a moment later an answer came back. It was all in code; I couldn’t understand a word.

He ordered us to our feet. We stood.

“Where are we going?” Olive asked timidly.

“For a walk,” he said. “A nice, orderly walk.” He had a clipped, vowel-flattened way of speaking that told me he was from somewhere else but faking a British accent, though not particularly well. Wights were supposed to be masters of disguise, but this one was clearly not a star pupil.

“You will not fall out of line,” he said, staring down each of us in turn. “You will not run. I have fifteen rounds in my clip — enough to put two holes in each of you. And don’t think I don’t see your jacket, invisible boy. Make me chase you and I’ll slice off your invisible thumbs for souvenirs.”

“Yes, sir,” said Millard.

“No talking!” the soldier boomed. “Now march!”

We marched past the ticket booth, the clerk now gone, then down off the platform, out of the depot, and into the streets. Though the denizens of Coal hadn’t given us a second glance when we’d come through town earlier, now their heads swiveled like owls as we trudged by in single file, at gunpoint. The soldier kept us in tight formation, barking at us when anyone strayed too far. I was at the rear, him behind me, and I could hear his ammunition belt clinking as we walked. We were heading back the way we’d come, straight out of town.

I dreamed up a dozen escape plans. We’d scatter. No — he’d shoot at least a few of us. Maybe someone could pretend to faint in the road, then the person behind would trip, and in the confusion — no, he was too disciplined to fall for anything like that. One of us would have to get close enough to take his gun away.

Me. I was closest. Maybe if I walked a little slower, let him catch up, then ran at him … but who was I kidding? I was no action hero. I was so scared I could hardly breathe. Anyway, he was ten whole yards behind me, and had his gun aimed right at my back. He’d shoot me the second I turned around, and I’d bleed out in the middle of the road. That was my idea of stupidity, not heroism.

A jeep zoomed up from behind and pulled alongside us, slowing to match our pace. There were two more soldiers in it, and though both wore mirrored sunglasses, I knew what was behind them. The wight in the passenger seat nodded to the one who’d captured us and gave a little salute — Nice going! — then turned to us and stared. From that moment he never took his eyes off us or his hands off his rifle.

Now we had escorts, and one rifle-wielding wight had become three. Any hope of escape I’d had was dashed.

We walked and walked, our shoes crunching on the gravel road, the jeep’s engine grumbling beside us like a cheap lawnmower. The town receded and a farm sprang up on either side of the tree-lined road, its fields fallow and bare. The soldiers never exchanged a word. There was something robotic about them, as if their brains had been scooped out and replaced with wires. Wights were supposed to be brilliant, but these guys seemed like drones to me. Then I heard a drone in my ear, and looked up to see a bee circle my head and fly away.

Hugh, I thought. What’s he up to? I looked for him in line, worried he might be planning something that would get us all shot — but I didn’t see him.

I did a quick head count. One-two-three-four-five-six. In front of me was Emma, then Enoch, Horace, Olive, Millard, and Bronwyn.

Where was Hugh?

I nearly leapt into the air. Hugh wasn’t here! That meant he hadn’t been rounded up with the rest of us. He was still free! Maybe in the chaos at the depot he’d slipped down into the gap between the train and the platform, or hopped onto the train without the soldier noticing. I wondered if he was following us — wished I could look back at the road behind without giving him away.

I hoped he wasn’t, because that might mean he was with Miss Peregrine. Otherwise, how would we ever find her again? And what if she ran out of air, locked in that trunk? And what did they do with suspiciously abandoned baggage in 1940, anyway?

My face flushed hot and my throat tightened. There were too many things to be terrified of, a hundred horror scenarios all vying for attention in my brain.

“Back in line!” the soldier behind me shouted, and I realized that it was me he was talking to — that in my fevered state I’d strayed too far from the center of the road. I hurried back to my place behind Emma, who gave me a pleading look over her shoulder — Don’t make him angry! — and I promised myself I’d keep it together.

We walked on in edgy silence, tension humming through us like an electric current. I could see it in Emma as she clenched and unclenched her fists; in Enoch as he shook his head and muttered to himself; in Olive’s uneven steps. It seemed like just a matter of time before one of us did something desperate and bullets started flying.

Then I heard Bronwyn gasp and I looked up, a horror scenario I hadn’t yet imagined taking shape before my eyes. Three massive forms lay ahead of us, one in the road and two more in the field adjacent, just the other side of a shallow ditch. Heaps of black earth, I thought at first, refusing to see.

Then we got closer, and I couldn’t pretend they were anything other than what they were: three horses dead in the road.

Olive screamed. Bronwyn instinctively went to comfort her — “Don’t look, little magpie!”—and the soldier riding shotgun fired into the air. We dove to the ground and covered our heads.

“Do that again and you’ll be lying in the ditch beside them!” he shouted.

As we returned to our feet, Emma angled toward me and breathed the word Gypsies, then nodded at the closest horse. I took her meaning: these were their horses. I even recognized the markings on one — white spots on its hind legs — and realized it was the very horse I’d been clinging to just an hour ago.

I felt like I was about to be sick.

It all came together, playing out like a movie in my head. The wights had done this — the same ones who’d raided our camp the night before. The Gypsies had met them along the road after leaving us at the edge of town. There’d been a skirmish, then a chase. The wights had shot the Gypsies’ horses right out from under them.

I knew the wights had killed people — killed peculiar children, Miss Avocet had said — but the brutality of shooting these animals seemed to exceed even that evil. An hour ago they’d been some of the most fully alive creatures I’d ever seen — eyes gleaming with intelligence, bodies rippling with muscle, radiating heat — and now, thanks to the intervention of a few pieces of metal, they were nothing but heaps of cold meat. These proud, strong animals, shot down and left in the road like garbage.

I shook with fear, seethed with anger. I was sorry, too, that I’d been so unappreciative of them. What a spoiled, ungrateful ass I was.

Pull it together, I told myself. Pull yourself together.

Where were Bekhir and his men now? Where was his son? All I knew was that the wights were going to shoot us. I was sure of it now. These impostors in soldiers’ costumes were nothing but animals themselves; more monstrous even than the hollowgast they controlled. The wights, at least, had minds that could reason — but they used that creative faculty to dismantle the world. To make living things into dead things. And for what? So that they might live a little longer. So that they might have a little more power over the world around them, and the creatures in it, for whom they cared so little.

Waste. Such a stupid waste.

And now they were going to waste us. Lead us to some killing field where we’d be interrogated and dumped. And if Hugh had been dumb enough to follow us — if the bee flying up and down our line meant he was nearby — then they’d kill him, too.

God help us all.

The fallen horses were well behind us when the soldiers ordered us to turn off the main road and down a narrow farm lane. It was hardly more than a footpath, just a few feet wide, so the soldiers who’d been riding alongside us had to park their jeep and walk, one in front and two behind. On either side of us the fields grew wild, bursting with flowering weeds and humming with late-summer insects.

A beautiful place to die.

After a while, a thatch-roofed shack came into sight at the edge of the fields. That’s where they’ll do it, I thought. That’s where they’ll kill us.

As we got closer, a door opened and a soldier stepped out of the shack. He was dressed differently than the ones around us: instead of a helmet he wore a black-brimmed officer’s hat, and instead of a rifle he carried a holstered revolver.

This one was in charge.

He stood in the lane as we approached, rocking on his heels and flashing a pearly grin. “We meet at last!” he called out. “You’ve given us quite the go-round, but I knew we’d catch you in the end. Only a matter of time!” He had pudgy, boyish features, thin hair that was so blond it was almost white, and he was full of weird, chipper energy, like an overcaffeinated Cub Scout leader. But all I could think when I looked at him was: Animal. Monster. Murderer.

“Come in, come in,” the officer said, pulling open the shack’s door. “Friends of yours are waiting inside.”

As his soldiers shoved us past him, I caught a glimpse of the name stitched on his shirt: WHITE. Like the color.

Mister White. A joke, maybe? Nothing about him seemed genuine; that least of all.

We were pushed inside, shouted into a corner. The shack’s one room was bare of furniture and crowded with people. Bekhir and his men sat on the floor with their backs to the walls. They’d been treated badly; they were bruised, bleeding, and slouched in attitudes of defeat. A few were missing, including Bekhir’s boy. Standing guard were two more soldiers — that made six altogether, including Mr. White and our escorts.

Bekhir caught my eye and nodded gravely. His cheeks were purpled with bruises. I’m sorry, he mouthed to me.

Mr. White saw our exchange and skipped over to Bekhir. “Aha! You recognize these children?”

“No,” Bekhir said, looking down.

“No?” Mr. White feigned shock. “But you apologized to that one. You must know him, unless you make a habit of apologizing to strangers?”

“They aren’t the ones you’re looking for,” Bekhir said.

“I think they are,” said Mr. White. “I think these are the very children we’ve been looking for. And furthermore, I think they spent last night in your camp.”

“I told you, I’ve never seen them before.”

Mr. White clucked his tongue like a disapproving schoolmarm.

“Gypsy, do you remember what I promised to do if I found out you were lying to me?” He unsheathed a knife from his belt and held it against Bekhir’s cheek. “That’s right. I promised to cut your lying tongue out and feed it to my dog. And I always keep my promises.”

Bekhir met Mr. White’s blank stare and stared back, unflinching. The seconds spun out in unbearable silence. My eyes were fixed on the knife. Finally, Mr. White cracked a smile and stood smartly upright again, breaking the spell. “But,” he said cheerily, “first things first!” He turned to face the soldiers who had escorted us. “Which of you has their bird?”

The soldiers looked at one another. One shook his head, then another.

“We didn’t see it,” said the one who’d taken us prisoner at the depot.

Mr. White’s smile faltered. He knelt down next to Bekhir. “You told me they had the bird with them,” he said.

Bekhir shrugged. “Birds have wings. They come and go.”

Mr. White stabbed Bekhir in the thigh. Just like that: quick and emotionless, the blade going in and out. Bekhir howled in surprise and pain and rolled onto his side, gripping his leg as blood began to flow.

Horace fainted and slid to the floor. Olive gasped and covered her eyes.

“That’s twice you’ve lied to me,” Mr. White said, wiping the blade clean on a handkerchief.

The rest of us clenched our teeth and held our tongues, but I could see Emma plotting revenge already, clasping her hands together behind her back, getting them nice and warm.

Mr. White dropped the bloody handkerchief on the floor, slid the knife back into its sheath, and stood up to face us. He was almost but not quite smiling, his eyes wide, unibrow raised in a capital M.

“Where is your bird?” he asked calmly. The nicer he pretended to be, the more it scared the hell out of me.

“She flew away,” Emma said bitterly. “Just like that man told you.”

I wished she hadn’t said anything; now I was afraid he’d single her out for torment.

Mr. White stepped toward Emma and said, “Her wing was injured. You were seen with her just yesterday. She couldn’t be far from here.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll ask you again.”

“She died,” I said. “We threw her in a river.”

Maybe if I were a bigger pain in his butt than Emma, he’d forget she’d ever spoken.

Mr. White sighed. His right hand glided across his holstered gun, lingered over the handle of his knife, then came to rest on his belt’s brass buckle. He lowered his voice, as if what he was about to say were meant for my ears only.

“I see what the trouble is. You believe there’s nothing to be gained by being honest with me. That we will kill you regardless of what you do or say. I need you to know this is not the case. However, in the spirit of total honesty, I will say this: you shouldn’t have made us chase you. That was a mistake. This could’ve been so much easier, but now everyone’s angry, you see, because you’ve wasted so much of our time.”

He flicked a finger toward his soldiers. “These men? They’d like very much to hurt you. I, on the other hand, am able to consider things from your point of view. We do seem frightening, I understand that. Our first meeting, on board my submarine, was regrettably uncivil. What’s more, your ymbrynes have been poisoning you with misinformation about us for generations. So it’s only natural that you’d run. In light of all that, I’m willing to make you what I believe to be a reasonable offer. Show us to the bird right now, and rather than hurting you, we’ll send you off to a nice facility where you’ll be well looked after. Fed every day, each with your own bed … a place no more restrictive than that ridiculous loop you’ve been hiding in all these years.”

Mr. White looked at his men and laughed. “Can you believe they spent the last — what is it, seventy years? — on a tiny island, living the same day over and over? Worse than any prison camp I can think of. It would’ve been so much easier to cooperate!” He shrugged, looked back at us. “But pride, venal pride, got the better of you. And to think, all this time we could’ve been working together toward a common good!”

“Working together?” said Emma. “You hunted us! Sent monsters to kill us!”

Damn it, I thought. Keep quiet.

Mr. White made a sad puppy-dog face. “Monsters?” he said.

“That hurts. That’s me you’re talking about, you know! Me and all my men here, before we evolved. I’ll try not to take your slight personally, though. The adolescent phase is rarely attractive, whatever the species.” He clapped his hands sharply, which made me jump.

“Now then, down to business!”

He raked us with a slow, icy stare, as if scanning our ranks for weakness. Which of us would crack first? Which would actually tell him the truth about where Miss Peregrine was?

Mr. White zeroed in on Horace. He’d recovered from his faint but was still on the floor, crouched and shaking. Mr. White took a decisive step toward him. Horace flinched at the click of his boots.

“Stand up, boy.”

Horace didn’t move.

“Someone get him up.”

A soldier yanked Horace up roughly by his arm. Horace cowered before Mr. White, his eyes on the floor.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Huh-huh-Horace …”

“Well, Huh-Horace, you seem like someone with abundant common sense. So I’ll let you choose.”

Horace raised his head slightly. “Choose …?”

Mr. White unsheathed the knife from his belt and pointed it at the Gypsies. “Which of these men to kill first. Unless, of course, you’d like to tell me where your ymbryne is. Then no one has to die.”

Horace squeezed his eyes shut, as if he could simply wish himself away from here.

“Or,” Mr. White said, “if you’d rather not choose one of them, I’d be happy to choose one of you. Would you rather do that?”

“No!”

“Then tell me!” Mr. White thundered, his lips snarling back to reveal gleaming teeth.

“Don’t tell them anything, syndrigasti!” shouted Bekhir — and then one of the soldiers kicked him in the stomach, and he groaned and fell quiet.

Mr. White reached out and grabbed Horace by the chin, trying to force him to look right into his horrible blank eyes. “You’ll tell me, won’t you? You’ll tell me, and I won’t hurt you.”

“Yes,” Horace said, still squeezing his eyes shut — still wishing himself gone, yet still here.

“Yes, what?”

Horace drew a shaking breath. “Yes, I’ll tell you.”

“Don’t!” shouted Emma.

Oh God, I thought. He’s going to give her up. He’s too weak.

We should’ve left him at the menagerie …

“Shh,” Mr. White hissed in his ear. “Don’t listen to them. Now, go ahead, son. Tell me where that bird is.”

“She’s in the drawer,” said Horace.

Mr. White’s unibrow knit together. “The drawer. What drawer?”

“Same one she’s always been in,” said Horace.

He shook Horace by the jaw and shouted, “What drawer?!”

Horace started to say something, then closed his mouth. Swallowed hard. Stiffened his back. Then his eyes came open and he looked hard into Mr. White’s and said, “Your mother’s knickers drawer,” and he spat right in Mr. White’s face.

Mr. White slammed Horace in the side of the head with the handle of his knife. Olive screamed and several of us flinched in vicarious pain as Horace dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes, loose change and train tickets spilling out of his pockets.

“What’s this?” said Mr. White, bending down to look.

“I caught them trying to catch a train,” said the soldier who’d caught us.

“Why are you just telling me this now?”

The soldier faltered. “I thought — ”

“Never mind,” Mr. White said. “Go intercept it. Now.”

“Sir?”

Mr. White glanced at the ticket, then at his watch. “The eight-thirty to London makes a long stop at Porthmadog. If you’re quick, it’ll be waiting for you there. Search it from front to back — starting with first class.”

The soldier saluted him and ran outside.

Mr. White turned to the other soldiers. “Search the rest of them,” he said. “Let’s see if they’re carrying anything else of interest. If they resist, shoot them.”

While two soldiers with rifles covered us, a third went from peculiar to peculiar, rooting through our pockets. Most of us had nothing but crumbs and lint, but the soldier found an ivory comb on Bronwyn — “Please, it belonged to my mother!” she begged, but he only laughed and said, “She might’ve taught you how to use it, mannish girl!”

Enoch was carrying a small bag of worm-packed grave dirt, which the soldier opened, sniffed, and dropped in disgust. In my pocket he found my dead cell phone. Emma saw it clatter to the floor and looked at me strangely, wondering why I still had it. Horace lay unmoving on the floor, either knocked out or playing possum. Then it was Emma’s turn, but she wasn’t having it. When the soldier came toward her, she snarled, “Lay a hand on me and I’ll burn it off!”

“Please, hold your fire!” he said, and broke out laughing. “Sorry, couldn’t resist.”

“I’m not joking,” Emma said, and she took her hands out from behind her back. They were glowing red, and even from three feet away I could feel the heat they gave off.

The soldier jumped out of her reach. “Hot touch and a temper to match!” he said. “I like that in a woman. But burn me and Clark there’ll spackle the wall with your brainy bits.”

The soldier he’d indicated pressed the barrel of his rifle to Emma’s head. Emma squeezed her eyes shut, her chest rising and falling fast. Then she lowered her hands and folded them behind her back. She was positively vibrating with anger.

So was I.

“Careful, now,” the soldier warned her. “No sudden moves.”

My fists clenched as I watched him slide his hands up and down her legs, then run his fingers under the neckline of her dress, all with unnecessary slowness and a leering grin. I’d never felt so powerless in all my life, not even when we were trapped in that animal cage.

“She doesn’t have anything!” I shouted. “Leave her alone!”

I was ignored.

“I like this one,” the soldier said to Mr. White. “I think we should keep her awhile. For … science.”

Mr. White grimaced. “You are a disgusting specimen, corporal.

But I agree with you — she is fascinating. I’ve heard about you, you know,” he said to Emma. “I’d give anything to do what you can do. If only we could bottle those hands of yours …”

Mr. White smiled weirdly before turning back to the soldier.

“Finish up,” he snapped, “we don’t have all day.”

“With pleasure,” the soldier replied, and then he stood, dragging his hands up Emma’s torso as he rose.

What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion. I could see that this disgusting letch was about to lean in and give Emma a kiss. I could also see that, behind her back, Emma’s hands were now lined with flame. I knew where this was going: the second his lips got near her, she was going to reach around and melt his face — even if it meant taking a bullet. She’d reached a breaking point.

So had I.

I tensed, ready to fight. These, I was convinced, were our last moments. But we’d live them on our own terms — and if we were going to die, by God, we’d take a few wights with us along the way.

The soldier slid his hands around Emma’s waist. The barrel of another’s rifle dug into her forehead. She seemed to be pushing back against it, daring it to fire. Behind her back I saw her hands begin to spread, white-hot flame tracing along each of her fingers.

Here we go —

Then CRACK! — the report of a gun, stunning and sharp. I shut down, blacked out for a second.

When my sight came back, Emma was still standing. Her head still intact. The rifle that had been pressed against it was pointed down now, and the soldier who’d been about to kiss her had pulled away and spun around to face the window.

The gunshot had come from outside.

Every nerve in my body had gone numb, tingling with adrenaline.

“What was that?” said Mr. White, rushing to the window. I could see through the glass over his shoulder. The soldier who’d gone to intercept the train was standing outside, waist-deep in wildflowers. His back was to us, his rifle aimed at the field.

Mr. White reached through the bars that covered the window and pushed it open. “What the hell are you shooting at?” he shouted.

“Why are you still here?”

The soldier didn’t move, didn’t speak. The field was alive with the whine of insects, and briefly, that’s all we could hear.

“Corporal Brown!” bellowed Mr. White.

The man turned slowly, unsteady on his feet. The rifle slipped from his hands and fell into the tall grass. He took a few doddering steps forward.

Mr. White took the revolver from his holster and pointed it out the window at Brown. “Say something, damn you!”

Brown opened his mouth and tried to speak — but where his voice should’ve been, an eerie droning noise came echoing up from his guts, mimicking the sound that was everywhere in the fields around him.

It was the sound of bees. Hundreds, thousands of them. Next came the bees themselves: just a few at first, drifting through his parted lips. Then some power beyond his own seemed to take hold of him: his shoulders pulled back and his chest pressed forward and his jaws ratcheted wide open, and from his gaping mouth there poured forth such a dense stream of bees that they were like one solid object; a long, fat hose of insects unspooling endlessly from his throat.

Mr. White stumbled back from the window, horrified and baffled.

Out in the field, Brown collapsed in a cloud of stinging insects. As his body fell, another was revealed behind him.

It was a boy.

Hugh.

He stood defiantly, staring through the window. The insects swung around him in a great, whirling sphere. The fields were packed with them — honeybees and hornets, wasps and yellow jackets, stinging things I couldn’t know or name — and every last one of them seemed to be at his command.

Mr. White raised his gun and fired. Emptied his clip.

Hugh went down, disappearing in the grass. I didn’t know whether he had fallen to the ground or dived to it. Then three other soldiers ran to the window, and while Bronwyn cried “Please, don’t kill him!” they raked the field with bullets, filling our ears with the thunder of their guns.

Then there were bees in the room. A dozen, maybe, furious and flinging themselves at the soldiers.

“Shut the window!” Mr. White screamed, swatting the air around him.

A soldier slammed the window closed. They all went to work smacking the bees that had gotten in. While they were busy with that, more and more collected outside — a giant, seething blanket of them pulsing against the other side of the glass — so many that by the time Mr. White and his men had finished killing the bees inside the room, the ones outside had nearly shut out the sun.

The soldiers clustered in the middle of the floor, backs together, rifles bristling out like porcupine quills. It was dark and hot, and the alien whine of a million manic bees reverberated through the room like something out of a nightmare.

“Make them leave us alone!” Mr. White shouted, his voice cracking, desperate.

As if anyone but Hugh could do that — if he was still alive.

“I’ll make you another offer,” said Bekhir, pulling himself to his feet using the window bars, his hobbled silhouette outlined against the dark glass. “Put down your guns or I open this window.”

Mr. White spun to face him. “Even a Gypsy wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that.”

“You think too highly of us,” Bekhir said, sliding his fingers toward the handle.

The soldiers raised their rifles.

“Go ahead,” said Bekhir. “Shoot.”

“Don’t, you’ll break the glass!” Mr. White shouted. “Grab him!”

Two soldiers threw down their rifles and lunged at Bekhir, but not before he punched his fist through the glass.

The entire window shattered. Bees flushed into the room. Chaos erupted — screams, gunfire, shoving — though I could hardly hear it over the roar of the insects, which seemed to fill not just my ears but every pore of my body.

People were climbing over one another to get out. To my right I saw Bronwyn push Olive to the floor and cover her with her body. Emma shouted “Get down!” and we ducked for cover as bees tumbled over our skin, our hair. I waited to die, for the bees to cover every exposed inch of me in stings that would shut down my nervous system.

Someone kicked open the door. Light blasted in. A dozen boots thundered across the floorboards.

It got quiet. I slowly uncovered my head.

The bees were gone. So were the soldiers.

Then, from outside, a chorus of panicked screams. I jumped up and rushed to the shattered window, where a knot of Gypsies and peculiars were already gathered, peering out.

At first I didn’t see the soldiers at all — just a giant, swirling mass of insects, so dense it was opaque, about fifty feet down the footpath.

The screams were coming from inside it.

Then, one by one, the screamers fell silent. When it was all over, the cloud of bees began to spread and scatter, unveiling the bodies of Mr. White and his men. They lay clustered in the low grass, dead or nearly so.

Twenty seconds later, their killers were gone, their monstrous hum fading as they settled back into the fields. In their wake fell a strange and bucolic calm, as if it were just another summer day, and nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Emma counted the soldiers’ bodies on her fingers. “Six. That’s all of them,” she said. “It’s over.”

I put my arms around her, shaking with gratitude and disbelief.

“Which of you are hurt?” said Bronwyn, looking around frantically. Those last moments had been crazy — countless bees, gunfire in the dark. We checked ourselves for holes. Horace was dazed but conscious, a trickle of blood running from his temple. Bekhir’s stab wound was deep but would heal. The rest of us were shaken but unhurt — and miraculously, not a single one of us was bee-stung.

“When you broke the window,” I said to Bekhir, “how did you know the bees wouldn’t attack us?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Luckily, your friend’s power is strong.”

Our friend …

Emma pulled away from me suddenly. “Oh my God!” she gasped. “Hugh!”

In all the chaos, we’d forgotten about him. He was probably bleeding to death right now, somewhere in the tall grass. But just as we were about to tear outside and look for him, he appeared in the doorway — bedraggled and grass-stained, but smiling.

“Hugh!” Olive cried, rushing to him. “You’re alive!”

“I am!” he said heartily. “Are all of you?”

“Thanks to you we are!” Bronwyn said. “Three cheers for

Hugh!”

“You’re our man in a pinch, Hugh!” cried Horace.

“Nowhere am I deadlier than in a field of wildflowers,” Hugh said, enjoying the attention.

“Sorry about all the times I made fun of your peculiarity,” said Enoch. “I suppose it’s not so useless.”

“Additionally,” said Millard, “I’d like to compliment Hugh on his impeccable timing. Really, if you’d arrived just a few seconds later …”

Hugh explained how he’d evaded capture at the depot by slipping down between the train and the platform — just like I’d thought.

He’d sent one of his bees trailing after us, which allowed him to follow from a careful distance. “Then it was just a matter of finding the perfect time to strike,” he said proudly, as if victory had been assured from the moment he decided to save us.

“And if you hadn’t accidentally stumbled across a field packed with bees?” Enoch said.

Hugh dug something from his pocket and held it up: a peculiar chicken egg. “Plan B,” he said.

Bekhir hobbled to Hugh and shook his hand. “Young man,” he said, “we owe you our lives.”

“What about your peculiar boy?” Millard asked Bekhir.

“He managed to escape with two of my men, thank God. We lost three fine animals today, but no people.” Bekhir bowed to Hugh, and I thought for a moment he might even take Hugh’s hand and kiss it. “You must allow us to repay you!”

Hugh blushed. “There’s no need, I assure you — ”

“And no time, either,” said Emma, pushing Hugh out the door.

“We have a train to catch!”

Those of us who hadn’t yet realized Miss Peregrine was gone went pale.

“We’ll take their jeep,” said Millard. “If we’re lucky — and if that wight was correct — we might just be able to catch the train during its stopover in Porthmadog.”

“I know a shortcut,” Bekhir said, and he drew a simple map in the dirt with his shoe.

We thanked the Gyspies. I told Bekhir we were sorry we’d caused them so much trouble, and he unleashed a big, booming laugh and waved us on down the path. “We’ll meet again, syndrigasti,” he said. “I’m certain of it!”

We squeezed into the wights’ jeep, eight kids packed like sardines into a vehicle built for three. Because I was the only one who’d driven a car before, I took the wheel. I spent way too long figuring out how to start the damn thing — not with a key, it turned out, but by pushing a button on the floor — and then there was the matter of shifting gears; I’d only driven a manual transmission a few times, and always with my dad coaching me from the passenger seat. Despite all that, after a minute or two we were — bumpily, jerkily, somewhat hesitatingly — on our way.

I stomped the accelerator and drove as fast as the overloaded jeep would take us, while Millard shouted directions and everyone else held on for dear life. We reached the town of Porthmadog twenty minutes later, the train’s whistle blowing as we sped down the main street toward the station. We came to a skidding stop by the depot and tumbled out. I didn’t even bother to kill the engine. Racing through the station like cheetahs after a gazelle, we leapt on board the last car of the train just as it was pulling out of the station.

We stood doubled over and panting in the aisle while astonished passengers pretended not to stare. Sweating, dirty, and disheveled — we must’ve been a sight.

“We made it,” Emma gasped. “I can’t believe we made it.”

“I can’t believe I drove stick,” I said.

The conductor appeared. “You’re back,” he said with a beleaguered sigh. “I trust you still have your tickets?”

Horace fished them from his pocket in a wad.

“This way to your cabin,” said the conductor.

“Our trunk!” Bronwyn said, clutching at the conductor’s elbow. “Is it still there?”

The conductor pried his arm away. “I tried taking it to lost and found. Couldn’t move the blessed thing an inch.”

We ran from car to car until we reached the first-class cabin, where we found Bronwyn’s trunk sitting just where she’d left it. She rushed to it and threw open the latches, then the lid.

Miss Peregrine wasn’t inside. I had a mini heart attack.

“My bird!” Bronwyn cried. “Where’s my bird?!”

“Calm down, it’s right here,” said the conductor, and he pointed above our heads. Miss Peregrine was perched on a luggage rack, fast asleep.

Bronwyn stumbled back against the wall, so relieved she nearly fainted. “How did she get up there?”

The conductor raised an eyebrow. “It’s a very lifelike toy.” He turned and went to the door, then stopped and said, “By the way, where can I get one? My daughter would just love it.”

“I’m afraid she’s one of a kind,” Bronwyn said, and she took Miss Peregrine down and hugged her to her chest.

After all we’d been through over the past few days — not to mention the past few hours — the luxury of the first-class cabin came as a shock. Our car had plush leather couches, a dining table, and wide picture windows. It looked like a rich man’s living room, and we had it all to ourselves.

We took turns washing up in the wood-paneled bathroom, then availed ourselves of the dining menu. “Order anything you like,” Enoch said, picking up a telephone that was attached to the arm of a reclining chair. “Hello, do you have goose liver pâté? I should like all of it. Yes, all that you have. And toast triangles.”

No one said anything about what had happened. It was too much, too awful, and for now we just wanted to recover and forget. There was so much else to be done, so many more dangers left to reckon with.

We settled in for the journey. Outside, Porthmadog’s squat houses shrank away and Miss Wren’s mountain came into view, rising grayly above the hills. While the others drifted into conversations, my nose stayed glued to the window, and the endless unfolding thereness of 1940 beyond it — 1940 being a place that had until recently been merely pocket-sized in my experience, no wider than a tiny island, and a place I could leave any time I wished by passing through the dark belly of Cairnholm’s cairn. Since leaving the island, though, it had become a world, a whole world of marshy forests and smoke-wreathed towns and valleys crisscrossed with shining rivers; and of people and things that looked old but weren’t yet, like props and extras in some elaborately staged but plotless period movie — all of it flashing by and by and by out my window like a dream without end.

I fell asleep and woke, fell asleep and woke, the train’s rhythm hypnotizing me into a hazy state in which it was easy to forget that I was more than just a passive viewer, my window more than just a movie screen; that out there was every bit as real as in here. Then, slowly, I remembered how I’d come to be part of this: my grandfather; the island; the children. The pretty, flint-eyed girl next to me, her hand resting atop mine.

“Am I really here?” I asked her.

“Go back to sleep,” she said.

“Do you think we’ll be all right?”

She kissed me on the tip of my nose.

“Go back to sleep.”

CHAPTER VII

More terrible dreams, all mixed up, fading in and out of one another. Snippets of horrors from recent days: the steel eye of a gun barrel staring me down from close range; a road strewn with fallen horses; a hollowgast’s tongues straining toward me across a chasm; that awful, grinning wight and his empty eyes.

Then this: I’m back home again, but I’m a ghost. I drift down my street, through my front door, into my house. I find my father asleep at the kitchen table, a cordless phone clutched to his chest.

I’m not dead, I say, but my words don’t make sound.

I find my mother sitting on the edge of her bed, still in night-clothes, staring out the window at a pale afternoon. She’s gaunt, wrung out from crying. I reach out to touch her shoulder, but my hand passes right through it.

Then I’m at my own funeral, looking up from my grave at a rectangle of gray sky.

My three uncles peer down, their fat necks bulging from starched white collars.

Uncle Les: What a pity. Right?

Uncle Jack: You really gotta feel for Frank and Maryann right now.

Uncle Les: Yeah. What’re people gonna think? Uncle Bobby: They’ll think the kid had a screw loose. Which he did.

Uncle Jack: I knew it, though. That he’d pull something like this one day. He had that look, you know? Just a little …

Uncle Bobby: Screwy.

Uncle Les: That comes from his dad’s side of the family, not ours.

Uncle Jack: Still. Terrible.

Uncle Bobby: Yeah.

Uncle Jack: …

Uncle Les: …

Uncle Bobby: Buffet?

My uncles shuffle away. Ricky comes along, his green hair extra spiked for the occasion.

Bro. Now that you’re dead, can I have your bike?

I try to shout: I’m not dead!

I am just far away I’m sorry

But the words echo back at me, trapped inside my head.

The minister peers down. It’s Golan, holding a Bible, dressed in robes. He grins.

We’re waiting for you, Jacob.

A shovelful of dirt rains down on me.

We’re waiting.

I bolted upright, suddenly awake, my mouth dry as paper. Emma was next to me, hands on my shoulders. “Jacob! Thank God — you gave us a scare!”

“I did?”

“You were having a nightmare,” said Millard. He was seated across from us, looking like an empty suit of clothes starched into position. “Talking in your sleep, too.”

“I was?”

Emma dabbed sweat from my forehead with one of the first-class napkins. (Real cloth!) “You were,” she said. “But it sounded like gobbledygook. I couldn’t understand a word.”

I looked around self-consciously, but no else seemed to have noticed. The other children were spread throughout the car, catnapping, daydreaming out the window, or playing cards.

I sincerely hoped I was not starting to lose it.

“Do you often have nightmares?” asked Millard. “You should describe them to Horace. He’s good at sussing hidden meanings from dreams.”

Emma rubbed my arm. “You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and because I don’t like being fussed over, I changed the subject. Seeing that Millard had the Tales of the Peculiar open in his lap, I said, “Doing some light reading?”

“Studying,” he replied. “And to think I once dismissed these as just stories for children. They are, in fact, extraordinarily complex — cunning, even — in the way they conceal secret information about peculiardom. It would take me years, probably, to decode them all.”

“But what good is that to us now?” Emma said. “What good are loops if they can be breached by hollowgast? Even the secret ones in that book will be found out eventually.”

“Maybe it was just the one loop that was breached,” I said hopefully. “Maybe the hollow in Miss Wren’s loop was a freak, somehow.”

“A peculiar hollow!” said Millard. “That’s amusing — but no. He was no accident. I’m certain these ‘enhanced’ hollows were an integral part of the assault on our loops.”

“But how?” said Emma. “What’s changed about hollows that they can get into loops now?”

“That’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal,” said Millard. “We don’t know a lot about hollows, having never had the chance to examine one in a controlled setting. But it’s thought that, like normals, they lack something which you and I and everyone in this train car possesses — some essential peculiarness — which is what allows us to interact with loops; to bind with and be absorbed into them.”

“Like a key,” I said.

“Something like that,” said Millard. “Some believe that, like blood or spinal fluid, our peculiarness has physical substance. Others think it’s inside us but insubstantial. A second soul.”

“Huh,” I said. I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn’t a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn’t we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.

“I hate all that crackpot stuff,” said Emma. “The idea that you could capture the second soul in a jar? Gives me the quivers.”

“And yet, over the years, some attempts have been made to do just this,” said Millard. “What did that wight soldier say to you, Emma? ‘I wish I could bottle what you have,’ or something to that effect?”

Emma shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”

“The theory goes that if somehow our peculiar essence could be distilled and captured — in a bottle, as he said, or more likely a petri dish — then perhaps that essence could also be transferred from one being to another. If this were possible, imagine the black market in peculiar souls that might spring up among the wealthy and unscrupulous. Peculiarities like your spark or Bronwyn’s great strength sold to the highest bidder!”

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“Most peculiars agree with you,” said Millard, “which is why such research was outlawed many years ago.”

“As if the wights cared about our laws,” said Emma.

“But the whole idea seems crazy,” I said. “It couldn’t really work, could it?”

“I didn’t think so,” said Millard. “At least, not until yesterday. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Because of the hollow in the menagerie loop?”

“Right. Before yesterday I wasn’t even certain I believed in a ‘second soul.’ To my mind, there was only one compelling argument for its existence: that when a hollowgast consumes enough of us, it transforms into a different sort of creature — one that can travel through time loops.”

“It becomes a wight,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But only if it consumes peculiars. It can eat as many normals as it likes and it will never turn into a wight. Therefore, we must have something normals lack.”

“But that hollow at the menagerie didn’t become a wight,” said Emma. “It became a hollow that could enter loops.”

“Which makes me wonder if the wights have been tinkering with nature,” said Millard, “vis-à-vis the transference of peculiar souls.”

“I don’t even want to think about it,” said Emma. “Can we please, please talk about something else?”

“But where would they even get the souls?” I asked. “And how?”

“That’s it, I’m sitting somewhere else,” Emma said, and she got up to find another seat.

Millard and I rode in silence for a while. I couldn’t stop imagining being strapped to a table while a cabal of evil doctors removed my soul. How would they do it? With a needle? A knife?

To derail this morbid train of thought, I tried changing the subject again. “How did we all get to be peculiar in the first place?” I asked.

“No one’s certain,” Millard answered. “There are legends, though.”

“Like what?”

“Some people believe we’re descended from a handful of peculiars who lived a long, long time ago,” he said. “They were very powerful — and enormous, like the stone giant we found.”

I said, “Why are we so small, then, if we used to be giants?”

“The story goes that over the years, as we multiplied, our power diluted. As we became less powerful, we got smaller, too.”

“That’s all pretty hard to swallow,” I said. “I feel about as powerful as an ant.”

“Ants are quite powerful, actually, relative to their size.”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “The thing I really don’t get is, why me? I never asked to be this way. Who decided?”

It was a rhetorical question; I wasn’t really expecting an answer, but Millard gave me one anyway. “To quote a famous peculiar: ‘At the heart of nature’s mystery lies another mystery.’ ”

“Who said that?”

“We know him as Perplexus Anomalous. An invented name, probably, for a great thinker and philosopher. Perplexus was a cartographer, too. He drew the very first edition of the Map of Days, a thousand-something years ago.”

I chuckled. “You talk like a teacher sometimes. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“All the time,” Millard said. “I would’ve liked to try my hand at teaching. If I hadn’t been born like this.”

“You would’ve been great at it.”

“Thank you,” he said. Then he went quiet, and in the silence I could feel him dreaming it: scenes from a life that might’ve been. After a while he said, “I don’t want you to think that I don’t like being invisible. I do. I love being peculiar, Jacob — it’s the very core of who I am. But there are days I wish I could turn it off.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. But of course I didn’t. My peculiarity had its challenges, but at least I could participate in society.

The door to our compartment slid open. Millard quickly flipped up the hood of his jacket to hide his face — or rather, his apparent lack of one.

A young woman stood in the door. She wore a uniform and held a box of goods for sale. “Cigarettes?” she asked. “Chocolate?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

She looked at me. “You’re an American.”

“Afraid so.”

She gave me a pitying smile. “Hope you’re having a nice trip.

You picked an awkward time to visit Britain.”

I laughed. “So I’ve been told.”

She went out. Millard shifted his body to watch her go. “Pretty,” he said distantly.

It occurred to me that it had probably been a lot of years since he’d seen a girl outside of those few who lived on Cairnholm. But what chance would someone like him have with a normal girl, anyway?

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d been looking at him any particular way. “Like what?”

“Like you feel bad for me.”

“I don’t,” I said.

But I did.

Then Millard stood up from his seat, took off his coat, and disappeared. I didn’t see him again for a while.

The hours rolled on, and the children passed them by telling stories. They told stories about famous peculiars and about Miss Peregrine in the strange, exciting, early days of her loop, and eventually they came around to telling their own stories. Some I had heard before — like how Enoch had raised the dead in his father’s funeral parlor, or the way Bronwyn, at the tender age of ten, had snapped her abusive stepfather’s neck without quite meaning to — but others were new to me. For as old as they were, the kids didn’t often lapse into bouts of nostalgia.

Horace’s dreams had started when he was just six, but he didn’t realize they were predictive of anything until two years later, when one night he dreamed about the sinking of the Lusitania and the next day heard about it on the radio. Hugh, from a young age, had loved honey more than any other food, and at five he’d started eating honeycomb along with it — so ravenously that the first time he accidentally swallowed a bee, he didn’t notice until he felt it buzzing around in his stomach. “The bee didn’t seem to mind a bit,” Hugh said, “so I shrugged and went on eating. Pretty soon I had a whole hive down there.” When the bees needed to pollinate, he’d gone to find a field of blooming flowers, and that’s where he met Fiona, who was sleeping among them.

Hugh told her story, too. Fiona was a refugee from Ireland, he said, where she’d been growing food for the people in her village during the famine of the 1840s — until she was accused of being a witch and chased out. This is something Hugh had gleaned only after years of subtle, nonverbal communication with Fiona, who didn’t speak not because she couldn’t, Hugh said, but “because the things she’d witnessed in the famine were so horrific they stole her voice away.”

Then it was Emma’s turn, but she had no interest in telling her story.

“Why not?” whined Olive. “Come on, tell about when you found out you were peculiar!”

“It’s ancient history,” Emma muttered, “relevant to nothing. And hadn’t we better be thinking about the future instead of the past?”

“Someone’s being a grumplepuss,” said Olive.

Emma got up and left, heading to the back of the car where no one would bother her. I let a minute or two pass so that she wouldn’t feel hounded, then went and sat next to her. She saw me coming and hid behind a newspaper, pretending to read.

“Because I don’t care to discuss it,” she said from behind the paper. “That’s why!”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes, but you were going to ask, so I saved you the trouble.”

“Just to make it fair,” I said, “I’ll tell you something about me first.”

She peeked over the top of the paper, slightly intrigued. “But don’t I know everything about you already?”

“Ha,” I said. “Not hardly.”

“All right, then tell me three things about you I don’t know. Dark secrets only, please. Quickly, now!”

I racked my brain for interesting factoids about myself, but I could only think of embarrassing ones. “Okay, one. When I was little, I was really sensitive to seeing violence on TV. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t real. Even if it was just a cartoon mouse punching a cartoon cat, I would freak out and start crying.”

Her newspaper came down some. “Bless your tender soul!” she said. “And now look at you — impaling monstrous creatures right through their leaky eyeballs.”

“Two,” I said. “I was born on Halloween, and until I was eight years old my parents had me convinced that the candy people gave out when I knocked on their doors was birthday presents.”

“Hmm,” she said, lowering the paper a little more. “That one was only middlingly dark. You may continue nevertheless.”

“Three. When we first met, I was convinced you were about to cut my throat. But scared as I was, there was this tiny voice in my head saying: If this is the last face you ever see, at least it’s a beautiful one.”

The paper fell to her lap. “Jacob, that’s …” She looked at the floor, then out the window, then back at me. “What a sweet thing to say.”

“It’s true,” I said, and slid my hand across the seat to hers.

“Okay, your turn.”

“I’m not trying to hide anything, you know. It’s just that those musty stories make me feel ten years old again, and unwanted. That never goes away, no matter how many magical summer days have come between.”

That hurt was still with her, raw even all these years later.

“I want to know you,” I said. “Who you are, where you come from. That’s all.”

She shifted uncomfortably. “I never told you about my parents?”

“All I know I heard from Golan, that night in the icehouse. He said they gave you away to a traveling circus?”

“No, not quite.” She slid down in her seat, her voice falling to a whisper. “I suppose it’s better for you to know the truth than rumors and speculation. So, here goes.

“I started manifesting when I was just ten. Kept setting my bed on fire in my sleep, until my parents took away all my sheets and made me lie on a bare metal cot in a bare room with nothing flammable at all in it. They thought I was a pyromaniac and a liar, and the fact that I myself never seemed to get burned was as good as proof. But I couldn’t be burned, something even I didn’t know at first. I was ten: I didn’t know fig about anything! It’s a very scary thing, manifesting without understanding what’s happening to you, though it’s a fright nearly all peculiar children experience because so few of us are born to peculiar parents.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“One day, as far as anyone knew, I was as common as rice pudding, and the next I felt a curious itch in the palms of my hands. They grew red and swollen, then hot — so hot that I ran to the grocer’s and buried them in a case of frozen cod! When the fish began to thaw and stink, the grocer chased me home again, where he demanded that my mother pay for all I’d ruined. My hands were burning up by this time; the ice had only made it worse! Finally, they caught fire, and I was sure I’d gone stark raving mad.”

“What did your parents think?” I asked.

“My mother, who was a deeply superstitious person, ran out of the house and never came back. She thought I was a demon, arrived straight from Hell via her womb. The old man took a different approach. He beat me and locked me in my room, and when I tried to burn through the door he tied me down with asbestos sheets. Kept me like that for days, feeding me once in a while by hand, since he didn’t trust me enough to untie me. Which was a good thing for him, ’cause the minute he did I would’ve burned him black.”

“I wish you had,” I said.

“That’s sweet of you. But it wouldn’t have done any good. My parents were horrible people — but if they hadn’t been, and if I’d stayed with them much longer, there’s no question the hollows would’ve found me. I owe my life to two people: my younger sister, Julia, who freed me late one night so that I could finally run away; and Miss Peregrine, who discovered me a month later, working as a fire-eater at a traveling circus.” Emma smiled wistfully. “The day I met her, that’s what I call my birthday. The day I met my true mum.”

My heart melted a little. “Thank you for telling me,” I said. Hearing Emma’s story made me feel closer to her, and less alone in my own confusion. Every peculiar had struggled through a period of painful uncertainty. Every peculiar had been tried. The glaring difference between us was that my parents still loved me — and despite the problems I’d had with them, I loved them, too, in my own quiet way. The thought that I was hurting them now was a constant ache.

What did I owe them? How could it be reckoned against the debt I owed Miss Peregrine, or my obligation to my grandfather — or the sweet, heavy thing I felt for Emma, which seemed to grow stronger every time I looked at her?

The scales tipped always toward the latter. But eventually, if I lived through this, I would have to face up to the decision I had made and the pain I had caused.

If.

If always propelled my thoughts back to the present, because if depended so much on keeping my wits about me. I couldn’t properly sense things if I was distracted. If demanded my full presence and participation in now.

If, as much as it scared me, also kept me sane.

London approached, villages giving way to towns giving way to unbroken tracts of suburbia. I wondered what was waiting for us there; what new horrors lay ahead.

I glanced at a headline in the newspaper still open in Emma’s lap: AIR RAIDS RATTLE CAPITAL. SCORES DEAD.

I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing at all.