Hollow City

“Don’t lose her!” Emma shouted, and we all took off running after it, slipping and sliding on the ice, rounding the corner into the snow-choked alley that ran between the glaciated building and the one next to it.

The bird was gone.

“Drat!” Emma said. “Where’d she go?”

Then a series of odd sounds came up from the ground beneath our feet: metallic clanks, voices, and a noise like water flushing. We kicked the snow away to find a pair of wooden doors set into the bricks, like the entrance to a coal cellar.

The doors were unlatched. We pulled them open. Inside were steps that led down into the dark, covered in quick-melting ice, the meltwater draining loudly into an unseen gutter.

Emma crouched and called into the darkness. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“If you’re coming,” returned a distant voice, “come quickly!”

Emma stood up, surprised. Then shouted: “Who are you?”

We waited for an answer. None came.

“What are we waiting for?” said Olive. “It’s Miss Wren!”

“We don’t know that,” said Millard. “We don’t know what happened here.”

“Well, I’m going to find out,” Olive said, and before anyone could stop her she’d gone to the cellar doors and leapt through them, floating gently to the bottom. “I’m still alive!” her voice taunted us from the dark.

And so we were shamed into following her, and climbed down the steps to find a passage tunneled through thick ice. Freezing water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the walls in a steady stream. And it wasn’t completely dark, after all—gauzy light glowed from around a turn in the passage ahead.

We heard footsteps approaching. A shadow climbed the wall in front of us. Then a cloaked figure appeared at the turn in the passage, silhouetted in the light.

“Hello, children,” the figure said. “I am Balenciaga Wren, and I’m so pleased you’re here.”

CHAPTER XII

I am Balenciaga Wren.

Hearing those words was like uncorking a bottle under pressure. First came the initial release—gasps, giddy laughter—and then an outpouring of joy: Emma and I jumped and hugged each other; Horace fell to his knees and tossed up his arms in a wordless hallelujah! Olive was so excited that she lifted into the air even with her weighted shoes on, stuttering, “We-we-we—we thought we might never—never see another ymbryne ever-ever again!”

This, finally, was Miss Wren. Days ago she’d been nothing more to us than the obscure ymbryne of a little-known loop, but since then she’d achieved mythic stature: she was, as far as we knew, the last free and whole-bodied ymbryne, a living symbol of hope, something we’d all been starving for. And here she was, right in front of us, so human and frail. I recognized her from Addison’s photo, only now there was no trace of black left in her silver hair. Deep-set worry lines stacked her brow and held her mouth in parentheses, and her shoulders were hunched as if she were not merely old, but straining under some monumental burden; the weight of all our desperate hope piling down on her.

The ymbryne pulled back the hood of her cloak and said, “I am very glad to meet you, too, dears, but you must come inside at once; it isn’t safe out here.”

She turned and hobbled away into the passage. We fell into line, waddling behind her through the tunneled ice like a train of ducklings after their mother, feet shuffling and arms held out in awkward balance poses to keep from slipping. Such was the power of an ymbryne over peculiar children: the very presence of one—even one we’d only just met—had an immediate pacifying effect on us.

The floor ramped upward, leading us past silent furnaces bearded with frost, into a large room clogged floor to ceiling and wall to wall with ice except for the tunnel we were in, which had been carved straight through the middle. The ice was thick but clear, and in some places I could see twenty or thirty feet into it with only a slight waver of distortion. The room appeared to be a reception area, with rows of straight-backed chairs facing a massive desk and some filing cabinets, all trapped inside tons of ice. Blue-filtered daylight shone from a row of unreachable windows, beyond which was the street, a smear of indistinct gray.

A hundred hollows could spend a week hacking at that ice and not reach us. If not for the tunnel entrance, this place would make a perfect fortress. Either that or a perfect prison.

On the walls hung dozens of clocks, their stilled hands pointed every which way. (To keep track of the time in different loops, maybe?) Above them, directional signs pointed the way to certain offices:

← UNDERSECRETARY OF TEMPORAL AFFAIRS

← CONSERVATOR OF GRAPHICAL RECORDS

NONSPECIFIC MATTERS OF URGENCY →

DEPT. OF OBFUSCATION AND DEFERMENT →

Through the door to the Temporal Affairs office, I saw a man trapped in the ice. He was frozen in a stooped posture, as if he’d been trying to dislodge his feet as ice overtook the rest of him. He’d been there a long time. I shuddered and looked away.