Hollow City (32 page)

Esme broke away from Emma and ran to her sister. “Sam!” she cried, throwing her arms around the injured girl’s waist. “Thank Heaven you’re all right!”

“I don’t think she is!” Olive said. “I don’t think she is at all!”

But Sam worried only for Esme, not for herself. Once she’d hugged the stuffing out of her, Sam knelt down and held the little girl at arm’s length, scanning for cuts and bruises. “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.

“My ears are ringy. I scraped my knees. And I got some dirt in my eye …”

Then Esme began to tremble and cry, the shock of what had happened overcoming her again. Sam hugged her close, saying, “There, there …”

It made no sense that Sam’s body was functioning in any capacity. Stranger still, her wound wasn’t even bleeding, and there was no gore or little bits of entrails hanging out of it, like I knew to expect from horror movies. Instead, Sam looked like a paper doll that had been attacked with a giant hole-punch.

Though everyone was dying for an explanation, we had elected to give the girls a moment to themselves, and stared in amazement from a respectful distance.

Enoch, however, paid them no such courtesy. “Excuse me,” he said, crowding into their personal space, “but could you please explain how it is that you’re alive?”

“It’s nothing serious,” Sam said. “Although my dress may not survive.”

“Nothing serious?!” said Enoch. “I can see clear through you!”

“It does smart a little,” she admitted, “but it’ll fill in in a day or so. Things like this always do.”

Enoch laughed dementedly. “
Things like this?
”

“In the name of all that’s peculiar,” Millard said quietly. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

“She’s one of us,” I said.

*   *   *

We had questions. Lots of questions. As Esme’s tears began to fade, we worked up the courage to ask them.

Did Sam realize she was peculiar?

She knew she was different, she said, but had never heard the term
peculiar
.

Had she ever lived in a loop?

She had not (“A what?”), which meant she was just as old as she appeared to be. Twelve, she said.

Had no ymbryne ever come to find her?

“Someone came once,” she answered. “There were others like me, but to join them I would’ve had to leave Esme behind.”

“Esme can’t … 
do
anything?” I asked.

“I can count backward from one hundred in a duck voice,” Esme volunteered through her sniffles, and then began to demonstrate, quacking: “One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight …”

Before she could get any further, Esme was interrupted by a siren, this one high-pitched and moving fast in our direction. An ambulance careened into the alley and raced toward us, its headlights blacked out so that only pinpricks of light shone through. It skidded to a stop nearby, cut its siren, and a driver leapt out.

“Is anyone hurt?” the driver said, rushing over to us. He wore a rumpled gray uniform and a dented metal hat, and though he was full of energy, his face looked haggard, like he hadn’t slept in days.

His eyes met the hole in Sam’s chest, and he stopped dead in his tracks. “Cor blimey!”

Sam got to her feet. “It’s nothing, really!” she said. “I’m fine!” And to demonstrate how fine she was, she passed her fist in and out of the hole a few times and did a jumping jack.

The medic fainted.

“Hm,” said Hugh, nudging the fallen man with his foot.
“You’d think these chaps would be made of tougher stuff.”

“Since he’s clearly unfit for service, I say we borrow his ambulance,” Enoch said. “There’s no knowing where in the city that pigeon’s leading us. If it’s far, it could take us all night to reach Miss Wren on foot.”

Horace, who’d been sitting on a chunk of wall, sprang to his feet. “That’s a fine idea!” he said.

“It’s a
reprehensible
idea!” Bronwyn said. “You can’t steal an ambulance—injured persons need it!”

“
We’re
injured persons,” Horace whined. “
We
need it!”

“It’s hardly the same thing!”

“Saint Bronwyn!” Enoch said sarcastically. “Are you so concerned with the well-being of normals that you’d risk Miss Peregrine’s life to protect a few of theirs? A thousand of them aren’t worth one of her! Or one of us, for that matter!”

Bronwyn gasped. “What a thing to say in front of …”

Sam stalked toward Enoch with a humorless look on her face.

“Look here, boy,” she said, “if you imply that my sister’s life is worthless again, I will clobber you.”

“Calm down, I wasn’t referring to your sister. I only meant that …”

“I know exactly what you meant. And I’ll clobber you if you say it again.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve offended your delicate sensibilities,” Enoch said, his voice rising in exasperation, “but you’ve never had an ymbryne and you’ve never lived in a loop, and so you couldn’t possibly understand that this—right now—is not
real
, strictly speaking. It’s the
past
. The life of every normal in this city has already been lived. Their fates are predetermined, no matter how many ambulances we steal! So it doesn’t bloody
matter
, you see.”

Looking a bit baffled, Sam said nothing, but continued to give Enoch the evil eye.

“Even so,” said Bronwyn. “It’s not right to make people suffer
unnecessarily. We
can’t
take the ambulance!”

“That’s all well and good, but think of Miss Peregrine!” said Millard. “She can’t have more than a day left.”

Our group seemed evenly divided between stealing the ambulance or going on foot, so we put it to a vote. I myself was against taking it, but mostly because the roads were so pocked with bomb holes that I didn’t know how we’d drive the thing.

Emma took the vote. “Who’s for taking the ambulance?” she said.

A few hands shot up.

“And against?”

Suddenly there was a loud pop from the direction of the ambulance, and we all turned to see Miss Peregrine standing by as one of its rear tires hissed air. Miss Peregrine had voted with her beak—by stabbing it into the ambulance’s tire. Now
no one
could use it—not us, not injured persons—and there was no point in arguing or delaying any further.

“Well, that simplifies things,” said Millard. “We go on foot.”

“Miss Peregrine!” Bronwyn cried. “How could you?”

Ignoring Bronwyn’s indignation, Miss Peregrine hopped over to Melina, looked up at the pigeon on her shoulder, and screeched. The message was clear:
Let’s go already!

What could we do? Time was wasting.

“Come with us,” Emma said to Sam. “If there’s any justice in the world, we’ll be somewhere safe before the night is through.”

“I told you, I won’t leave my sister behind,” Sam replied.

“You’re going to one of those places she can’t enter, aren’t you?”

“I—I don’t know,” Emma stammered. “It’s possible …”

“I don’t care either way,” Sam said coldly. “After what I just saw, I wouldn’t so much as cross the road with you.”

Emma drew back, going a bit pale. In a small voice she asked, “Why?”

“If even outcasts and downtrodden folk like yourselves can’t
muster a bit of compassion for others,” she said, “then there’s no hope for this world.” And she turned away and carried Esme toward the ambulance.

Emma reacted as if she’d been slapped, her cheeks going red. She ran after Sam. “We don’t all think the way Enoch does! And as for our ymbryne, I’m sure she didn’t mean to do what she did!”

Sam spun to face her. “That was no accident! I’m glad my sister’s not like all of you. Wish to God
I
wasn’t.”

She turned away again, and this time Emma didn’t follow. With wounded eyes she watched Sam go, then slouched after the others. Somehow the olive branch she’d extended had turned into a snake and bitten her.

Bronwyn peeled off her sweater and set it down on the rubble. “Next time bombs start falling, have your sister wear this,” she called to Sam. “It’ll keep her safer than any bathtub.”

Sam said nothing; didn’t even look. She was bending over the ambulance driver, who was sitting up now and mumbling, “I had the queerest dream …”

“That was a stupid thing to do,” Enoch said to Bronwyn.

“Now
you
don’t have a sweater.”

“Shut your fat gob,” Bronwyn replied. “If you’d ever done a nice thing for another person, you might understand.”

“I
did
do something nice for another person,” Enoch said, “and it nearly got us eaten by hollows!”

We mumbled goodbyes that went unreturned and slipped quietly into the shadows. Melina took the pigeon from her shoulder and tossed it skyward. It flew a short distance before a string she’d tied around its foot snapped taut and it hovered, caught in the air, like a dog straining at its lead. “Miss Wren’s this way,” Melina said, nodding in the direction the bird was pulling, and we followed the girl and her pigeon friend down the alley.

I was about to assume hollow-watch, my now-customary position near the head of the group, when something made me glance
back at the sisters. I turned in time to see Sam lift Esme into the ambulance, then bend forward to plant a kiss on each of her scraped knees. I wondered what would happen to them. Later, Millard would tell me that the fact that none of them had ever heard of Sam—and someone with such a unique peculiarity would’ve been well known—meant she probably had not survived the war.

The whole episode had really gotten to Emma. I don’t know why it was so important for her to prove to a stranger that we were good-hearted, when we knew ourselves to be—but the suggestion that we were anything less than angels walking the earth, that our natures were more complexly shaded, seemed to bother her. “They don’t understand,” she kept saying.

Then again
, I thought,
maybe they do
.

S
o it had come to this: everything depended on a pigeon. Whether we would end the night in the womblike safety of an ymbryne’s care or half chewed in the churning black of a hollow’s guts; whether Miss Peregrine would be saved or we’d wander lost through this hellscape until her clock ran out; whether I would live to see my home or my parents again—it all depended on one scrawny, peculiar pigeon.

I walked at the front of the group, feeling for hollows, but it was really the pigeon who led us, tugging on its leash like a bloodhound after a scent. 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.

Coming down from the terrifying events of that evening, I’d reached a new low of exhaustion. My head tingled strangely. My feet dragged. The rumble of bombs had quieted and the sirens had finally wound down, and I wondered if all that apocalyptic noise had been keeping me awake. Now the smoky air was alive with subtler sounds: water gushing from broken mains, the whine of a trapped dog, hoarse voices moaning for help. Occasionally fellow travelers would materialize out of the dark, wraithlike figures escaped from some lower world, eyes shining with fear and suspicion, clutching random things in their arms—radios, looted silver, a gilt box, a funerary urn. Dead bearing the dead.

We came to a T in the road and stopped, the pigeon deliberating
between left and right. The girl murmured encouragements: “Come on, Winnie. There’s a good pigeon. Show us the way.”

Enoch leaned in and whispered, “If you don’t find Miss Wren, I will personally roast you on a spit.”

The bird leapt into the air, urging left.

Melina glowered at Enoch. “You’re an ass,” she said.

“I get results,” he replied.

Eventually we arrived at an underground station. The pigeon led us through its arched entry into a ticket lobby, and I was about to say
We’re taking the subway—smart bird
, when I realized the lobby was deserted and the ticket booth shuttered. Though it didn’t look like trains would be visiting this station anytime soon, we forged ahead regardless, through an unchained gate, along a hallway lined with peeling notices and chipped white tiles, to a deep staircase where we spiraled down and down into the city’s humming, electric-lit belly.