Hollow City

Miss Wren held the bird at arm’s length, turning her this way and that while Miss Peregrine squirmed. “Hum, hum, hum,” Miss Wren said under her breath, her eyes narrowing and lips drawing tight. “Something’s not right with your headmistress.”

“She got hurt,” said Olive. “Hurt on the inside.”

“She can’t turn human anymore,” said Emma.

Miss Wren nodded grimly, as if she’d already figured this out.

“How long’s it been?”

“Three days,” said Emma. “Ever since we stole her back from the wights.”

I said, “Your dog told us that if Miss Peregrine didn’t change back soon, she’d never be able to.”

“Yes,” Miss Wren said. “Addison was quite right about that.”

“He also said that the sort of help she needed was something only another ymbryne could give her,” said Emma.

“That’s right, too.”

“She’s changed,” said Bronwyn. “She isn’t herself anymore. We need the old Miss P back!”

“We can’t let this happen to her!” said Horace.

“So?” said Olive. “Can you turn her human now, please?”

We had surrounded Miss Wren and were pressing in on her, our desperation palpable.

Miss Wren put up her hands in a plea for quiet. “I wish it were that simple,” she said, “or so immediate. When an ymbryne remains a bird for too long, she becomes rigid, like a cold muscle. If you try and bend her back to shape too quickly, she’ll snap. She’s got to be massaged into her true form, delicately; worked and worked like clay. If I work with her through the night, I might have it done by morning.”

“If she has that long,” said Emma.

“Pray that she does,” said Miss Wren.

The long-haired girl returned, walking slowly toward us, dragging her hands along the tunnel walls. Everywhere they touched, layer upon layer of new ice formed. The tunnel behind her had already narrowed to just a few feet wide; soon it would be closed completely, and we’d be sealed in.

Miss Wren waved the girl over. “Althea! Run upstairs ahead of us and have the nurse prepare an examination room. I shall need all my medicinal remedies!”

“When you say remedies, do you mean your solutions, your infusions, or your suspensions?”

“All of them!” Miss Wren shouted. “And quickly—this is an emergency!”

Then I saw the girl notice Miss Peregrine, and her eyes widened a bit—the most I’d seen her react to anything—and she started up the stairs.

This time, she was running.

*   *   *

I held Miss Wren’s arm, steadying her as we climbed the stairs. The building had four stories, and we were heading for the top. Aside from the stairwell, that was the only part of the building still accessible; the other floors were all frozen shut, walls of ice clogging their rooms and hallways. We were, in effect, climbing through the hollowed center of a gigantic ice cube.

I glanced into some of the frozen rooms as we hurried past them. Bulging tongues of ice had broken doors off their hinges, and through their splintered jambs I could see evidence of a raid: kicked-over furniture, drawers torn open, snows of paper on the floor. A machine gun leaned against a desk, its owner frozen in flight. A peculiar slumped in a corner beneath a slash of bullet holes. Like the victims of Pompeii, arrested in ice rather than ash.

It was hard to believe one girl could have been responsible for all this. Apart from ymbrynes, Althea had to be one of the most powerful peculiars I’d ever met. I looked up in time to see her disappear around the landing above us, that endless mane of hair trailing behind her like a blurred afterimage.

I snapped an icicle off the wall. “She really did all this?” I said, turning it in my hand.

“She did indeed,” said Miss Wren, puffing beside me. “She is—or was, I should say—apprenticed to the minister of obfuscation and deferment, and was here performing her duties on the day the corrupted raided the building. At the time she knew little of her power other than that her hands radiated unnatural cold. To hear Althea tell it, her ability was the sort of thing that came in useful during hot summer days, but which she’d never thought of as a defense weapon until two hollows began devouring the minister before her very eyes. In mortal fear, she called upon a well of power previously unknown to her, froze the room—and the hollows—and then the entire building, all in the space of a few minutes.”

“Minutes!” Emma said. “I don’t believe it.”

“I rather wish I’d been here to witness it,” said Miss Wren, “though if I had, I likely would’ve been kidnapped along with the other ymbrynes who were present at the time—Miss Nightjar, Miss Finch, and Miss Crow.”

“Her ice didn’t stop the wights?” I asked.

“It stopped many of them,” said Miss Wren. “Several are still with us, I imagine, frozen in the building’s recesses. But despite their losses, the wights ultimately got what they came for. Before the entire building froze, they managed to secrete the ymbrynes out through the roof.” Miss Wren shook her head bitterly. “I swear on my life, one day I’ll personally escort all those that hurt my sisters to Hell.”