Hollow City

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.”