Hollow City: Chapters 11–13

We turned left when the bird flew left, and right when it jerked right, obedient as sheep even when it meant fumbling down streets cratered with ankle-breaking bomb holes or bristling with the bones of dismembered buildings, their jagged iron spear tips lurking dimly in the wavering fire glow, angled at our throats.

“It isn’t a proper holiday until we’ve plumbed every available sewer.”

To combat the dizzying effect of all this dreamlike madness, I reached into my pocket to palm the smooth glass of my phone, eyes closed for a moment, and whispered to myself, “I am a time traveler. This is real. I, Jacob Portman, am traveling in time.”

More astonishing, perhaps, was the fact that time travel hadn’t broken my brain; that by some miracle, I had not yet devolved into a gibbering crazy person ranting on a street corner.

The human psyche was much more flexible than I’d imagined, capable of expanding to contain all sorts of contradictions and seeming impossibilities.

It was only possible to keep so many kids in line because they were not actually kids—because there was some older nature inside them, warring against and balancing their childish impulses.

But everything here seemed peculiar—this entire loop, with all its chaotic strangeness, was perfect camouflage for peculiars.

“Some of these ‘oddities’ might be peculiar,” said Millard, “in which case they might know something about Miss Wren.

Finally, we decided to take a calculated risk.

“If you ever offered more than simple criticism,” Emma said, “if you ever gave a single useful suggestion during a crisis, rather than just shrugging your shoulders at the prospect of failure and death, I might be able to tolerate your unrelenting black moods!

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.

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.

“You brave, wonderful children. You’re miracles, every one of you, and any ymbryne would be lucky to call you her wards.”

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.

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.

“Althea wasn’t able to save the ymbrynes,” Miss Wren said, “but she made this place, and that’s blessing enough. Without it we’d have no refuge anywhere.

I was shocked by this sudden dismissal, especially considering that if we hadn’t worried about Miss Peregrine’s welfare—and risked our lives to bring her here!—she would’ve been condemned to spend the rest of her days trapped in the body of a bird.

My name is Sergei Andropov, and I am captain of peculiar resistance army.

“Because we’re wily," said Hugh.

People who are better equipped, who’ve trained for this sort of thing ...

Now, you’re a scrawny-looking bunch, but you’re peculiar, so I know you’ve all got hidden talents.

“A peculiar’s sole is the door to his soul,” he said.

“Now that we know what the wights are doing to us, I couldn’t live with myself if we just went back to the way things were, and tried to pretend none of this was happening. To fight is the only honorable thing.”

But when all is said and done, my allegiance doesn’t belong to those other ymbrynes, or to other peculiar children. It belongs to the woman to whom I owe my life—Miss Peregrine, and Miss Peregrine alone.

“And when, bird willing, she becomes herself again, I’ll do whatever she needs me to do. If she says fight, I’ll fight. If she wants to hide us away in a loop somewhere, I’ll go along with that, too. Either way, my creed has never changed: Miss Peregrine knows best.”

Protecting’s always been my vocation.

Peculiardom is dying, Jacob. It’s a lost dream. And even if somehow, by some miracle, we were to take up arms against the corrupted and prevail, we’d be left with a shadow of what we once had; a shattered mess.

Because you have a real home and a real family, and if you think any of us would’ve chosen this world over those things—wouldn’t have given up our loops and longevity and peculiar powers long ago for even a taste of what you have—then you really are living in a fantasy world.

This person you say you love? She’s really a hag, an old crone hiding in a body of a girl. You’re a young man—a boy—a baby compared to me.

It occurred to me that the business of surviving precluded a great many things, exploring and falling in love not least among them.

But Alma is my sister, you see, and though I wasn’t fortunate enough to inherit any of her talents for manipulating time, I do share her most useless trait—the ability to turn into a vicious little bird of prey.

While my lengthy observations of your childish bickering were incontrovertibly fascinating, I was quite hoping you could help me with a piece of unfinished business.

You proved yourselves to be quite resourceful.

Naturally, my men could’ve swept in and taken you at any point after that, but I thought it better to let you twist in the wind awhile and see if your ingenuity might not lead us to the one ymbryne who’s consistently managed to evade us.

We hide in these temporal backwaters, afraid of the very people we should be ruling, arrested in a state of perpetual childhood by this confederacy of busybodies—these women!

If we have to do it, I assure you we will, and we’ll dump your stinking corpse out a hole in the ice a piece at a time. While I’m sure your men won’t like that much, we’ll have a very long time to devise our next move.

Miss Wren was shouting, begging us to comply—“Do as they say or they’ll hurt you!"

A few of the kids took note of this with looks of surprise and fear, as if afraid they would age forward in a matter of minutes, but for most of them I think the shock of our sudden captivity was not about to be trumped by an unexpected trip to the present; they were worried about having their souls extracted, not about developing gray hair and liver spots.

The moment their connection was severed, they let out a scream so powerful it generated its own wind.

The last thing I saw, in the hellish red flashing, was Miss Wren being shoved into the train car and the doors snapping closed, and all my friends inside with her, cowering at gunpoint, framed by the shattered windows of the train, surrounded by men with white eyes.