The Desolations of Devil's Acre

by Ransom Riggs

  Our first layer of defenders had fallen along with the ymbrynes’ shield.

  Noor squeezed me tight as our hollow raced along the banks, bucking and rolling beneath us. Emma and Horatio kept pace to our left, and all around us was a surging sea of hollowflesh, their heavy breaths leaving a fine mist of stinking black air in our wake. Ahead was the loop entrance, the same one we’d used to enter and leave Devil’s Acre many times: a section of waterway capped by concrete to form a tunnel below. We were a block away when something massive emerged from the tunnel and unfolded itself: a giant man tall as a mature oak, his muscled body clothed in moss and leaves. It was another of Caul’s lieutenants, one of the wights who had been monstrously enhanced in the Library of Souls.

  He stood there blocking the loop entrance, water up to his waist and pounding his chest like a gorilla. Then he turned and picked up a small car parked on the overpass and launched it at us. My hollows scattered. It landed on its roof behind us and skidded into the water.

  “Think you can kill him?” Noor shouted.

  “Yeah,” I shouted back, “but it’s going to cost us time!”

  Caul knew his wight wouldn’t stop us. He was just trying to slow us down.

  I stopped most of my hollows a half block away, made two leap from one side of the water to the opposite bank, then sent four of them at the giant—two from his left and two from his right. He swatted one away with a hand the size of a dumpster. The hollow flew into the concrete bankside and fell, broken, into the water. Another jumped onto his head and wrapped him with its tongues like an octopus. The giant roared, reached behind him, and tore it off, but while his hands were occupied, the other two wrapped their tongues around his neck and squeezed as hard as they could. The giant turned to face the overpass and smashed the hollow he was holding against it repeatedly, until I felt the life go out of it. But by then his face was turning red and he couldn’t breathe, and he began to stumble around, swiping at the hollows and trying to pry their tongues from his throat without success. Finally, he blacked out and fell face-first into the water, unconscious, and the hollows fed upon his eyes.

  “Good show, Jacob!” Emma shouted.

  “Two hollows for one huge wight,” Noor said. “Not bad!”

  “That depends on how many more he’s got,” I said. “Now hang on and get ready to hold your breath, we’re about to get wet!”

  With a barely perceptible nod from me, my hollows took off running again. We raced down the banks to the overpass, then leapt in the water beside the unmoving giant. The two hollows who’d felled him rejoined us, and I could sense something in them that felt like happiness, or giddiness; the adrenaline spike of predators who’d just made a kill.

  We swam through the tunnel, water soaking us to the neck. The hollows’ tongues pulled us quickly along until the circle of light behind us equaled the size of the one ahead. And then the changeover gripped us, and in a moment we were flying out the other side, into the middle of a war.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  We emerged into the Acre to find a smoking ruin. A battle must have raged here not long ago but had since moved on, leaving craters and shattered buildings behind—and more bodies, Caul’s addicts and our peculiars both.

  My hollows swam to the bank and climbed out of the water—straight into a cloud of stinging bees. We were swatting the air like mad when I heard a familiar voice shout, “Jacob! Is that you?”

  It was Hugh. He was stretched out on the ground with his back against a concrete bridge support, panting and sweating and dirty—but alive. “Hugh!” I called out to him. “You’re back!” And as he leapt up and ran toward us, the cloud of bees around us dissipated.

  “We never left—couldn’t find a way out!” he shouted. “And never mind me, you’re back! And Emma and Noor! Thank the birds you’re okay—” He skidded to a stop at the outer ring of my hollows, turning a bit pale. “Say, you’re controlling these, right? Like last time?”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” I said, my hollow fording through the others to meet him.

  “Hugh, you’re a sight for sore eyes!” Emma cried. “What happened?”

  “The shield’s gone!” he said. “The minute it disappeared, lots of us started running for the loop entrance because we were expecting an attack. We thought it would be hollows, not these giant wights. The Americans sent a windstorm and lightning bolts at them and shot them loads of times, but it didn’t stop them. And Caul . . .” His eyes cut to a peculiar lying nearby, gray as death and breathing in stutters.

  “We know what he can do,” Noor said darkly.

  “Just have to figure out how to kill him,” I added. “Climb on.” I made a hollow kneel before him. He hesitated.

  “Hugh, get on!” Emma shouted.

  “You’re sure you’ve got them well in hand?”

  “Very sure.”

  Hugh gave a steely smile. “Then we’ve got a chance.” He mounted the beast’s shoulders. It wrapped a tongue around his waist and stood. Hugh opened his mouth and sucked the cloud of bees down his throat.

  Hugh directed me toward the fighting, but I hardly needed directions; judging from the debris-darkened sky and roaring crashes in the distance, the battle was raging in the center of the Acre. I followed a trail of wreckage down crooked alleys, through the mazelike domain of looped normals, through a section of Acre that was burning so badly the smoke had turned day to night.

  I kept Hugh’s hollow close to mine and Noor’s so I could hear him, and we shouted to each other as the hollows ran.

  “Where are the ymbrynes?” I asked him.

  “Fighting!” he replied, bear-hugging his hollow’s neck to keep from being flung off. “Most have turned into birds and have been launching attacks from the sky.”

  Our shouts echoed off the close-set walls around us.

  “And Fiona?” Emma said.

  “Laying a trap for the giants! Near the ministries building!”

  My stomach dropped as the hollows took a running leap over a flipped wagon, then skidded around a sharp corner.

  “How many giant wights does Caul have with him?” Emma asked.

  “Five, including one at the loop entrance! And they’re tall as houses!”

  “And how many ambro addicts?” I yelled.

  “Could be dozens! We outnumber them, but they’ve all taken massive doses of ambrosia, and they’re powerful.”

  “Did Bronwyn come back?” Noor said, and I could feel her tense. “Did she have a boy and two girls with her?”

  But there was no time for him to reply, because I’d found our way out of the maze and into the middle of a skirmish. We sped out of the tenement zone into Louche Lane, where many of the shops were burning—more smoke, more bodies—and right away something collided with one of my hollows and I felt its leg shatter.

  Down the street there was a towering mound of humanity that looked like a cross between a melting ice cream cone and Jabba the Hutt—and it was spitting something sharp from its mouth at deadly velocity, white chips that looked like fragments of bone. Blanketing the street in volleys of it. On the other side, a trio of Americans were taking shelter behind a low wall and firing at the flesh-mound with rifles. They saw our horde of hollows arrive and started shooting at us, too. A few bullets caromed harmlessly off my hollows’ armor-plated chests.

  Because I knew the Americans by sight—one of them was Wreck Donovan—I took an educated guess that the flesh-mound was an ambro addict and sent three hollows at him. One caught a burst of bone projectile in the face and died instantly, but the others leapt on the addict and chewed him to pieces in no time. When the Americans realized what was happening, they stopped shooting at us. Wreck recognized me and stood up, alarmed.

  Someone who didn’t know me might’ve thought we’d been taken by these hollows and they were about to devour us, but Wreck grinned a
nd pumped his fist in victory. “Thank you!” he shouted, leading his comrades out from their shelter. “Come on now, battle’s this way!”

  They sprinted alongside us toward the heart of the Acre. We skirted the fires of Smoking Street and cut through Attenuated Avenue, where my hollows killed an addict as he crouched in a doorway tipping back his head to fortify himself with a new dose of ambrosia. He was dead before he hit the ground, the contents of his vial splashing across the cobblestones in an arc of sparkling silver. They had a bigger stockpile of the stuff than anyone had realized and seemed intent on using every last drop of it today, either to dominate or exterminate us. And I wondered—inasmuch as I had time to wonder anything—how they had gotten so much, and whether it had anything to do with the Library of Souls. Was Caul distilling new batches from the souls there? A question, one of many, that would have to wait for an answer, if one ever came.

  While Hugh hung on for his life, Emma pressed him for vital information: Where were our friends? Where could Miss Peregrine be found, and had Caul’s forces spread all through the Acre or were they concentrated in one place? But Hugh was a famously bad explainer of things even when he wasn’t juiced with adrenaline, and the fighting was moving so fast that minutes-old intelligence was next to useless, anyway.

  We crossed through Old Pye Square, where a few ambro addicts were engaged in a running battle with a couple of outmatched home guards. I peeled two hollows away from my herd to help them while the rest of us charged onward. There wasn’t time to stop and oversee the fight; the main battle was raging up ahead.

  From a distance all I could see was a smoke-obscured chaos of rampaging giants and flying debris, the ambrosia addicts’ powerful eye-beams piercing the haze like searchlights during a bombing raid. Caul’s forces were sweeping down the wide avenue and leaving a tide of devastation behind them. I tightened my grip on our hollows and spurred them faster, and as we covered more ground, things came into focus. The tip of Caul’s spear was dozens of ambro addicts, shock troops who swept ahead of the wights in a shield formation to attack anyone they saw, and they did so rabidly; the ambrosia had made them not just powerful, but fearless. Behind them marched Caul’s four remaining enhanced wights, each toweringly large and a unique flavor of monstrous. Three of them thundered along tearing at the walls of buildings, hurling the pieces down the street like cannonballs. One of them was Murnau, returned to fight by his master’s side. The fourth thrummed the air with huge leathery wings while spraying down streams of corrosive liquid. Hovering in the middle of it all was Caul, or rather his blue-glowing head, grinning like a madman and as big as a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. A thinner contingent of ambro addicts ran behind them, a buffer against attacks from the rear. My hollows would chew through them soon enough.

  I sent a single hollow racing ahead as a scout, and my view of things became clearer still. Our peculiars were mounting a brave defense. From doorways, windows, and rooftops, squads of defenders were firing guns and using whatever offensive abilities they had—telekinesis, bolts of electricity, the strength to launch heavy objects long distances—to slow the horde’s progress. Some of our people had tried to face the onslaught head-on and been crushed. Their bodies lay crumpled in the streets.

  My scout passed a giant wight who was howling with anger as reels of thorny vines pulled taut around his legs, which I guessed was Fiona’s handiwork. A gang of walking corpses that could only have been Enoch’s were hacking away at a group of addicts with hatchets, and more were on the way. A grimbear charged past them and knocked Murnau to the ground with a resounding crash, but a moment later the animal was flung away, the wight left with a gash across his face but still in fighting shape. Exploding eggs landed among Caul’s horde, dropped by ymbrynes circling above. The leather-winged wight shot a stream of black acid at them and the ymbrynes banked quickly to avoid it, then dropped another pair of eggs that landed right in front of the wight tangled in Fiona’s vines, knocking him violently backward.

  None of it had been enough to stop Caul’s army, or even to slow them down much. Not one of the four wights had been killed. They were making slow but steady progress toward the ministries building, where a phalanx of defenders stood waiting in the Ministry’s courtyard behind a fortification of metal plates and sandbags. If things kept going the way they were going, they would get crushed.

  Fortunately, I’d brought an army of my own.

  “Jacob!” Noor was shaking me by the shoulders. “Jacob!” She pointed to an ambro addict running toward us with a spike-tipped club in his hands. I’d slowed our advance while my scout got the lay of the land, and somehow I’d allowed an enemy through our shield of hollows. Just before he reached us I made the hollow we were riding whip a tongue around his neck and slam him to the ground. He landed face-up, and I felt the beams from his bulging eyes singe my legs as they swung across me. He was aiming for my face and might’ve blinded me had Noor not reached out and snatched his light from the air. Then his head disappeared between my hollow’s jaws, and I felt the crunch of his collapsing skull rattle through the hollow’s body and my own.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I got distracted . . .”

  “What are you waiting for?” Emma shouted. “Send in the hollows!”

  “I’m about to!” I said, my cohort of monsters tensing like sprinters before the starting gun. “Right . . . now.”

  Twenty-one hollowgast shot away from us, all I had save the three we were riding. Within seconds they had scattered the rear line of ambrosia addicts and begun tearing into the wights. Killing them was my first priority, and I assigned four hollows to each one. I sicced four more on the ambro addicts with loose instructions to just, you know, kill them. My last two hollows, besides the three we were riding, I dedicated to Caul. Two weren’t enough to do more than annoy him, and they probably wouldn’t live long, but their sacrifice would keep Caul busy for a short time while my hollows picked off as many of his lieutenants and foot soldiers as they could.

  Hugh shouted that he thought a lot of people, including more ymbrynes, were inside the ministries building. Through the smoke I could see people firing at the horde through its doors, home guards launching metal harpoon nets from its upper windows, and more ymbrynes circling the roof in bird form. It was the strongest and most solid building in the Acre, and probably the most defensible—but if my hollows couldn’t stop Caul’s forces from reaching it, they would take it apart and smash whoever was inside.

  “We’ve got to try and reach it!” Emma shouted at me. “We need to get to the ymbrynes and make sure they know the hollows are under your control!”

  We shot forward, hugging the buildings on the far side of the street as I tried to maneuver us around and ahead of the battle without being spotted. That took half my attention; the other half was immersed in the fray. My hollows had killed several addicts already, but lost a couple of their own. I had hoped they would make quick work of the wights, but they were significantly bigger and nastier than the one we’d faced at the Acre’s loop entrance. I’d judged the smallest of them to be the most vulnerable, but only realized his touch made things burst into flame after he’d turned four of my hollows into Fourth of July sparklers. The hollows’ direct-contact style of killing wasn’t going to work on him. It did work on a gargantuan wight with the thousand-eyed face of a housefly: They pulled his limbs off one by one and left him writhing helplessly in the street, though not before he’d removed three of their heads with the terrifying pincers he had for arms.

  That left thirteen, plus the three we were riding. We ran around the worst of the fighting in a wide arc, narrowly avoiding a blast of the winged wight’s acid. Meanwhile, the two hollows I’d sent to fight Caul were having no luck: Their tongues and teeth passed right through him. His giant head was an empty projection, like the one he’d sent to frighten us at the all-Acre assembly. Which meant, worryingly, that the real Caul was somewhere else and had yet to reveal himself.
His likeness was screaming and ranting like a carnival barker, though his words were barely audible over the din of the battle: “Look, children, how your ymbrynes have failed you! Look, and despair!”

  We pulled ahead of the battle. Our three hollowgast steeds sprinted around the vanguard of ambro addicts, now scattered and fighting fiercely, too occupied with fending off attacks from my other hollows to pay us any notice. As we galloped up the steps to the ministries building’s forecourt, Dogface recognized me and shouted for his cohort to hold their fire. I gave him a grateful nod and he returned a grin as we sped past them to the door, where Miss Peregrine and Bronwyn were waiting.

  We dismounted and threw our arms around them.

  “Oh, thank the bloody elders!” Bronwyn shouted, pulling me off my feet.

  I saw Miss Peregrine staring at Horatio. “This is Horatio, H’s ex-hollowgast,” I said to Miss Peregrine. “You can trust him.”

  She nodded, then looked me over. “Are any of you hurt?”

  “We’re fine,” Emma said, rushing forward to embrace her. “I’m so happy you’re safe!”

  “Are the other light-eaters with you?” I said to Bronwyn, suddenly frantic to know.

  “They’re inside,” Miss Peregrine said, and a flood of relief shot through me. “When you called from the train station, and I heard Caul’s voice, I feared that was the end of you. And when Miss Bruntley and your new friends snuck back from the safe house into the Acre and told me what you were attempting, I nearly lost all hope.” She broke into a grin, her eyes darting to the hollows behind me. “But I see you’ve done it again.”

  “I thought you were going to kill all of them,” Bronwyn said.