by Ransom Riggs
“This is better, don’t you think?” I said, glancing back to watch a trio of hollows tear a spider-legged wight off the side of a building. The wall he’d been clinging to tore away with him, crushing them all.
“Manifestly,” said Miss Peregrine. She was beaming with pride, but then something ricocheted off the arched doorway above our heads and her smile vanished. “Now get inside before all this celebrating gets one of you killed.” She gestured to the hollows we’d ridden in on. “Not them. If they come in you’ll spark a stampede for the exits.”
I ordered the hollows to stay outside and help Dogface’s squad defend the building, and then we were pulled through the doorway by Miss Peregrine and Bronwyn. Miss Peregrine drew me into a corner and said, “Tell me what you need. Help me help you.”
“I need a window where I can see the fighting. And enough quiet to concentrate.”
“You shall have it.” She took me by the arm and led us from the hallway into the Ministry’s lobby. It was crowded with peculiars, though not the officious functionaries in waistcoats who usually occupied this space. Instead, there were wounded being treated by bone-menders on the marble floor. There were people clustered to watch the battle from the room’s large windows. Home guards were running up and down the staircase to the upper floors, where we could hear them firing volley after volley of bullets into the fray. A few anxious ymbrynes were rounding up the smallest and most vulnerable peculiar children and leading them toward the back of the room, ready to evacuate. Everyone else was preparing for battle however they could, improvising helmets from food bowls and strapping on welding goggles borrowed from the Acre’s defunct tin smelting factory, a sight both touching and pathetic; though unafraid of war, we were profoundly ill-suited for it. We were not superheroes. We were not born fighters, but had been forced into the role. We were simply peculiar.
And here were our friends, thank God: Horace and Olive and Claire, running at us with open arms; Millard, circulating among a group of invisibles in modern clothes; Sebbie and Sophie hovering over Julius, who was slumped in a chair and looking not at all well. Enoch and Josep stood at one of the windows, and Fiona, who’d already been joined by Hugh, stood at another. They were all preoccupied with controlling their proxy armies of corpses and vines, and Francesca was hovering around them to make certain no one approached them and broke their concentration.
Miss Peregrine cleared a space for me at the window beside Fiona and Hugh. Fiona looked at me and smiled, then returned to her work. There wasn’t time for a reunion. My head was mired in the battle, too, and Miss Peregrine shooed away all comers with a sweep of her arm, then stepped back and planted her feet.
The tide of the battle was starting to tilt in our favor. Caul’s assault had been interrupted, his soldiers shocked by my hollows’ blitz and fully engaged in a close-quarters defense of their jugular veins and soft bits—but it wasn’t over. Caul’s horde had been halved, but so had my hollows, and those who remained in the fight were hurt and losing steam.
It was coming to a stalemate. We needed an extra push or our enemies would break through my hollows and overrun the ministries building. I turned to Miss Peregrine and said, “I need everything you’ve got. Any firepower we have that won’t cost us more lives.”
Miss Peregrine gave a grim nod. “One final assault.” She looked to Miss Cuckoo, who was standing at attention in a vivid blue jumpsuit. “Isabel, you heard the boy.”
Miss Cuckoo put two fingers in her mouth and blew an ear-splitting birdcall, which a moment later was echoed by every ymbryne in the room.
“Fiona’s got a trick up her sleeve,” said Hugh. “Time to use it?”
“Yes, Fiona, now,” said Miss Peregrine.
Fiona grinned, then bowed her head in concentration.
Emma cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “ALL HANDS ON DECK!” And then she ran upstairs to lob fireballs from the roof.
“Let’s go, Josep,” Enoch said, hooking his American friend by the elbow. “We’ve got a tomb’s worth of bodies waiting in the wings,” he explained to me, “just got to slap a few hearts in ’em . . .”
“Don’t go out there!” Miss Peregrine cried. “It’s far too dangerous!”
Before Miss Peregrine could stop him, they had run out the door. Seconds later, Millard and his invisible friends had followed them, shedding their clothes so they could throw exploding eggs at the wights from close range without being seen. I was moved by their courage, but anxious that there were now friends among the foes on the battlefield. I worried it would be too easy to mix them up in my splintered state of mind.
I slowed my breathing and attempted to focus. The street outside was a maelstrom of bullets, explosions, and flying debris, which was hurting my hollows just as much as the wights and addicts. (Caul, still just a projection, floated amid it all, seemingly untouchable.) I decided to change strategy and sent all of my hollows at Murnau, one of only two remaining wights. While they descended on him, the other, winged wight and the addicts were kept busy with new attacks on several fronts: a swarm of Enoch’s and Josep’s dead from the right, a hail of exploding eggs from the invisibles on the left, a barrage of gunfire from the home guard and fireballs launched by Emma from the roof.
Our enemies were pinned from three sides and had nowhere to go but backward, which Caul would never allow them to do.
They began dying. The ambro addicts fell, one after another. My hollows tore Murnau limb from limb, but before they could kill him the winged one spewed a thick stream of acid at them, melting Murnau’s head and several of my hollows in the bargain; each one sent a burst of pain through me before disappearing from my mind.
Murnau was dead. But the fight was far from over.
The shooting had stopped. Our defenders on the roof and in the courtyard had apparently run out of bullets and eggs, and the ambro addicts took the opportunity to rush the building. I heard Fiona cry out next to me and wrench her hands in the air, and the next moment all the addicts went sprawling as hidden cables of thorned vines pulled taut before them on the ground. Fiona turned her palms upward while her fingers danced like a pianist’s. The vines writhed and wriggled over the addicts until they were fastened to the ground. And then the last of Enoch’s and Josep’s dead army descended on the addicts, hacking and chopping them to bits.
Cheers went up around us, but I was too fixed on my next target to celebrate. Out the window, something big, black, and rapidly approaching blotted out the sky. “Get away from the windows!” Bronwyn yelled, tackling me, Fiona, and Hugh to the ground just as the glass shattered and a mass of black acid splattered the floor beyond us, steaming and eating through the marble.
“Elders above, that was too bloody close,” I heard Hugh say.
I’d hardly even noticed that I’d hit my head hard on the floor; in my mind I was outside, scaling the face of the building with my eight remaining hollows. The winged wight who’d nearly melted us was swooping around to make another attack. This time I’d be ready for him.
He was an ungainly bastard, a half man, half dragon almost too heavy for his lizard wings, so it was easy to anticipate his trajectory. I spread my hollows across the roof. They got a running start and leapt off the roof toward him just as he launched another burst of acid—and this time he launched it at them. Two of my hollows were hit full in the chest and died instantly. Another hollow missed its target and fell several stories to the ground, impaling itself on one of the now-fully-dead undead’s pikes. The rest used their tongues to grapple onto the winged wight like Spider-Man. He roared as their sudden added weight sent him spiraling. He crashed into the roof, narrowly missing Emma and a contingent of home guards.
A ferocious fight commenced, the wight and my hollows rolling and grappling, the hollows tearing at the wight while the wight tried to melt them with its corrosive spit, which sprayed across the roof and sent up torrents of steam. Although
I needed every hollow I had, I forced one to peel away from the pack and sweep Emma and the home guards away from the fighting to safety.
A minute later, the four hollows were dead, the wight nearly so, its wings broken and face bloodied. The fifth hollow returned to finish it off with a savage twist of its tongues around the wight’s neck. Before it died the wight shot one last blast of acid that melted the hollow’s head into a concave puddle. And then I had only three left—the ones we’d ridden in on.
But Caul had no one. Now he was alone.
I returned fully to my own mind and peered through the shattered window. The street was empty.
“Have we won?” Hugh asked cautiously. “Are they all dead—even Caul?”
“He couldn’t be,” Miss Peregrine said, her eyes narrowing. “Unless he was somehow linked to his cohort . . .”
“And his life-force piggybacked theirs back into the world,” said Miss Cuckoo, finishing her sentence.
“It’s possible,” said Miss Wren, combing pulverized plaster from her hair with her fingers. “Our understanding of the Library and its powers is woefully incomplete.”
There was a thunder of footsteps as Josep and Millard rushed in from outside. “Someone help!” Josep cried. “Enoch’s been hurt, I fear badly!”
We raced outside. Hugh, Noor, and Miss Peregrine were beside me. As we passed the line of addicts who’d been felled by Fiona’s vines and Enoch’s dead, a hand caught my ankle and I tripped. One of the addicts was still alive, though a hatchet was buried deep in his back. “It’s all happening!” he said, blood spilling through his broken-toothed grin. “All according to Master’s plan . . .”
Having no interest in the ravings of dying traitors, I kicked him in his ambrosia-melted face, shook loose, and ran on.
Enoch lay in the street with gashes raking his face and blood soaking his shirt. His brow was knit tight in pain, eyes squeezed shut.
“It’s all right, old chap, we’ve got you now,” Hugh was saying, and together the four of us picked him up as gently as we could.
Then a sound like an earthquake came from way down the street, and we turned to see a low bank of storm clouds moving toward us. The clouds were blood red.
Below them, gliding on a pedestal of whirling blue wind, was Caul. The real one, not his projection.
“Alma! Alma, I’m coming home!” he was crying, and his voice seemed to boom down from the heavens.
“Get inside!” Miss Peregrine shouted.
We ran, Josep and Bronwyn helping to shoulder Enoch. I looked back only once. The wind he rode funneled down into a black hole that moved with him along the street. His arms were spread and his wriggling fingers were ever-lengthening, their span wide enough to rake the buildings on both sides of the street. He brought with him a wave of desolation. Every wooden thing they touched turned black with rot, every piece of metal flaked to rust, every wounded body on the ground withered into a corpse.
Inside, Miss Peregrine and the ymbrynes quickly organized an evacuation through the building’s rear door. “We are going to Bentham’s house!” Miss Peregrine announced. “We have enough ymbrynes to make a diminutive version of the Quilt around it, and once it’s established we’ll evacuate via the Panloopticon.”
“We can’t give up now!” Horace groaned. “Not after defeating Caul’s whole army!”
“We’re not giving up,” Miss Cuckoo said. “We’re making a tactical retreat.”
They were turning away when Noor ran up to them. “It’s our time to fight,” said Noor. “See his blue light? I think that’s his soul—the one we light-eaters are supposed to eat. It used to just flash before but now it’s constant, and I think—”
“Absolutely out of the question,” Miss Peregrine said, flapping her arms to shoo Noor toward the exit with everyone else. “That’s a guess at best, and we can’t have you throwing yourselves at Caul based on a guess.”
“It’s more than that!” Noor shot back. “And this might be our only— Wait!” She looked suddenly concerned and snapped her head around. “Where’d Sebbie go? She was just here!”
We heard a scream from the window and turned to see one of the ymbrynes-in-training pointing outside. We ran back to the window to see Sebbie outside alone, running straight toward Caul. She was gathering light as she ran, leaving long stripes of undulating dark behind her, clearly readying for a fight.
“SEBBIE, WAIT!” Noor screamed, but all three ymbrynes grabbed her and wouldn’t let her go.
“Elders help her,” Miss Wren said, her face etched with pain. “But we cannot slow.”
Noor struggled as they held her back, looked to me for help, but I was vacating myself, going inward to send my last three hollows to help Sebbie. They bounded across the courtyard, past the Americans’ abandoned fortifications, then past Sebbie and into the street.
Caul saw them and cried out in glee. “Come to me, pets!” his voice sang down from the bloodred clouds.
One hollow wrapped its tongues around Caul’s neck while the other two grabbed Caul by his long arms. But then his even longer fingers curled around their two bodies and I felt them start to wither and die. Their sacrifice bought Sebbie a chance to get near Caul without being touched by him. She bravely ran toward him, slowed a little by the cyclonic wind that whipped around his lower half, but only briefly. She swept her hands through the wind, scraped up the blue light that glowed brightly from it, and when she had it all, she sucked it into her mouth. And then Sebbie was the one glowing blue, and Caul’s tornado began to slow and shrink and he seemed to melt into the black hole below him. Sebbie was weaving and wobbling as if about to lose consciousness, and then she tipped forward and fell into the hole.
Screams from my friends. From Noor.
My hollows were dying. All of them.
“Look!” Miss Cuckoo shouted.
A hand had appeared at the hole’s rim. Someone was pulling themselves up and out of it.
But it wasn’t Sebbie. It was Caul. Noor’s face fell into her hands.
He was glowing blue, bluer than ever, and the last thing my lone remaining hollow saw before it died was Caul grinning down at it.
“It’s good to be home,” he said. And then he laced his long fingers together and cracked his knuckles.
Ninety-nine peculiar children, their allies, and their ymbrynes—all refugees in their own loop—fled across Devil’s Acre. We were pursued by a drumming rain of blood, ash, and bone fragments, as well as the demon who’d summoned them. By the time we made it to Bentham’s house, panting and spent, we were covered in a clinging paste that made us look ghostly. Noor and I and our trio of ymbrynes, Peregrine, Cuckoo, and Wren, were the last to arrive, and Sharon and Addison were waiting to slam and bolt Bentham’s great entry doors the moment we raced across the threshold.
A lock on a door would hardly protect us from Caul, though, so the ymbrynes immediately got to work creating a new shield around the house. Miss Peregrine explained that they hadn’t built one around the ministries building because it probably wouldn’t have worked—there were certain enhancing elements in the Panloopticon itself that would help compensate for the lack of Miss Babax, their assassinated twelfth sister—and even if it had been possible, the ymbrynes would not want to have been trapped there, anyway. That would only have sentenced us to the slow starvation of a siege. The Panloopticon and its many doors were our ticket out.
So, while all their wards took shelter in the bunkerlike basement, the ymbrynes wove their Quilt, singing and circling in the wide foyer. The desolations were rapidly getting worse, blood seeping through cracks in the ceiling and bone fragments breaking windows. Even in the basement we could hear Caul’s approach, his gloating, cackling laughter and the freight train roar of his personal tornado getting louder by the second. Then a tremendous quake rattled the floor, and despite it having felt like Caul had just torn the building from
its foundations, Francesca assured everyone that it was the Quilt. Over her objections my friends and I ran upstairs to look through a window, and sure enough the Quilt’s reassuring green glow was shining outside.
Caul was out there—we could hear him roaring, enraged—but for the time being, it seemed we were safe. We could think, plan our next move. And Rafael, the only bone-mender who’d survived the battle, could tend to the injured. Enoch was one of the worst hurt, and Rafael set to work right away easing his pain and patching him up.
We were all tired, hurting, rattled. My head was full of ghosts, the echoes of my dead hollows. Emma found the washroom and we each took a long turn inside, doing our best to wash the battle off our skin and our clothes, to scour the dried blood from our hands and rinse the ash-paste from our faces. Even after five minutes of effort it still coated my hair, making me look like I’d gone prematurely gray. It wasn’t hard to believe; I felt a hundred years old. I imagined finally washing my hair to find that it really had turned the color of ash.
Ulysses Critchley was waiting for us. We’d been summoned to Bentham’s library, and we followed him there to join Miss Peregrine in a grim-faced discussion with Miss Wren, Miss Avocet, and Perplexus Anomalous. They were huddled before a darkened hearth, discussing our escape, and they wanted our input. We sat on a long fur-covered couch and listened to our options.
There were many, none appealing. There were one hundred forty-three doors in the Panloopticon, eighty-six of which had survived the wight’s rampage through the building earlier in the day. Eighty-six loop doors leading to eighty-six loops. But were any of them someplace Caul wouldn’t be able to quickly find us?
“He and Bentham created these loop doors themselves and know them intimately,” Millard pointed out. “And once you choose one, we’re trapped there. We won’t be able to return to the Panloopticon.”
“But if we can find an exit membrane in one of them, we can escape through it into the outer past,” said Miss Wren.
