by Ransom Riggs
LaMothe’s Northern clan would be positioned strategically around the loop entrance. Leo’s goons had proved themselves cowards and were nowhere to be found, but the leaders of his three under-gangs—Wreck Donovan, Angelica, and even Dogface and his Untouchables—lined up to join the Defense Corps. When I looked surprised to see them there, they shrugged it off as nothing more than self-interest, but I was starting to think they weren’t as mercenary as they let on.
Finally, just before nightfall, Francesca’s voice came over the loudspeakers. The shield was ready to be created, she announced, and anyone who wanted to be present for its weaving should proceed immediately to the loop entrance.
The entire loop flooded into the streets.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
They called it the Quilt, and the ymbrynes thought it would instill some small measure of peace in us to watch it being sewn together, to see for ourselves that it was real.
We gathered near the loop entrance, along the banks of the Ditch where it disappeared into the tunnel. Torches and gas lamps cast a flickering glow over the crowd, spectators a hundred strong on one side of the water, a tight circle of twelve ymbrynes on the other, hands linked. My friends and I all stood together. Guards watched over everything from the top of the bridge tunnel, and the two who’d been assigned to watch Noor and me stood nearby, scanning the crowd for threats. As many times as we’d evaded them, they still took their jobs seriously.
Across the Ditch, the ymbrynes began to sing in Old Peculiar and walk slowly in a circle.
“Hope they don’t collapse the place by accident,” Enoch whispered to a pretty, curly-haired girl standing beside him in the crowd, and she looked so alarmed Enoch had to reassure her that he was kidding.
Horace shushed him. “This is no time to joke around. If this doesn’t work, we’re all in trouble.”
“What’s deadly is how boring you are. If I wasn’t here to lighten the mood now and then, everyone would’ve hung themselves ages ago.”
Horace scowled. “If you could see the future, you wouldn’t be laughing.”
“Hush, both of you,” hissed Millard, who I hadn’t realized was standing nearby.
“Shouldn’t you be off squinting at maps?” Enoch said.
“We’re close to a breakthrough, I think. And I wasn’t about to miss this.”
The ymbrynes began singing louder and spinning faster, their long dresses fluttering in the air. A green light began to glow from the center of their circle. Some in the crowd gasped.
The ymbrynes sang louder, spun faster. The light grew brighter.
“Here it comes,” I heard Millard say, and Noor, standing next to me, pressed herself to my side.
The light brightened again and expanded upward. The ymbrynes’ song crescendoed in a high, wavering note that held—and then, all at once and with a sound like a thunderclap, they leapt into the air and assumed their avian forms. A collective gasp went up from the crowd. The ymbrynes maintained their formation, flying now instead of running, but its diameter grew wider and wider, and with it the pulsing green light. They were working it, pulling it like taffy.
Then they flew up into the sky, Miss Avocet first, Miss Peregrine last, the others in formation between them, the green light stretching and following. They turned a loop in the air above us, then swooped down and disappeared into the darkness of the bridge tunnel. The green glow that followed them lit the tunnel briefly and brilliantly, then was gone with the ymbrynes.
There was a brief period of silence, five seconds that stretched to ten. Murmurs of worry rippled through the crowd. Where had they gone? Were they coming back? Was it over?
Then a green light winked into view at the edge of the dark horizon. It began to draw itself across the sky like a shimmering blanket, a too-bright aurora borealis, and as it spread from one corner of the heavens to the other, veins of electric white light crackled through it. Once it had filled the sky, casting a subtle green glow over everything, a noise like a train approaching sounded from the tunnel.
After a few seconds the ymbrynes flew out of it again in a tight cluster, pulling behind them a net of green almost too bright to look at. It permeated the tunnel but went no farther, creating a semi-translucent wall. The ymbrynes did one last circle over our heads, an encouraging victory flourish, then flew off in the direction of their council chamber, pulling the crackling green net with them until it covered the whole sky.
The crowd buzzed with excitement.
“Never seen anything like it,” the girl beside Enoch said.
“Three cheers for our birds!” Claire cried, punching the air with her fists. “I’d like to see nasty old Caul try and get through that!”
“Certainly was impressive!” Horace enthused.
“It’s just some green light,” Enoch said.
“I just hope it works,” I said.
“It will,” said Claire.
A guard with a bullhorn reminded us it was past curfew and began herding us back to our beds.
“What do you think?” Noor said to me as the crowd started to move. “Are we safe for a while?”
I glanced at the moonlit clouds above us, glowing pale green behind the ymbrynes’ Quilt, and wondered how much of it was for show. “For a while, I think. Not forever.”
We hadn’t gone fifty feet when something crackled like static above our heads, and the crowd, which had been shuffling along calmly, stopped and looked up. Looming overhead was a face, giant and rendered in blue.
“Very impressive, quite the display, very impressive!” he boomed.
Caul, or the holographic version of him, had returned to mock us. The timing was precise: He had come to undermine our sense of security just as the ymbrynes were building it up.
“He can’t hurt you! Don’t panic!” someone shouted, but it was too late, and this time we weren’t trapped in a packed auditorium. Everybody scrambled for cover. The stampede knocked me into Noor and we both fell to the ground, but before we could be crushed, Bronwyn heaved us over her shoulder with Claire and Olive.
Caul wailed, “Oh, what shall I do, whatever shall I do? Let me in, let me in! I am stymied, flummoxed, perplexed!”
A volley of gunshots rang out, but it was just the Americans shooting at Caul’s image. Their bullets peppered the field of green overhead and got stuck, frozen in the air like a swarm of bees. The crowd was fleeing in a dozen directions, diving into nearby buildings and running for distant parts of the Acre. Bronwyn appeared to be following our friends back toward the house, but Caul’s sneering face and shrill voice followed us wherever we went, omnipresent.
“I’m only joking, of course! I relish a challenge, though it won’t be much of one.” His voice sounded like it was right in my ear. “I would expect nothing less from my dear sister and her whelps. We haven’t come to see you yet, incidentally, because we’re just getting warmed up. Stretching our just-born limbs.” An image of a monstrous blue-veined tree branch shot across the sky, then dissipated in sparks.
“We, we, we. Who is we, you ask? I do have friends, you know. Here they are now, in a loop you might recognize!”
Caul’s face disappeared, and in its place a terrifying scene was projected against the green sky. I watched it, transfixed, while Bronwyn ran. Two monstrous creatures menaced a house as children fled screaming. Towering above the roof, one creature had a head shaped like an eel and black leathery wings sprouting from its back. It tore at the house with clawlike hands, peeling back pieces of the roof and tossing them into the air. The other looked like an amalgamation of steaming tar in a roughly human form. It shambled into a cow tied to a post, passed through it, and the cow melted into a flaming puddle. The eel-headed thing bent down on one knee and scooped up a fleeing child in its wing, then went on destroying the house.
“That’s Miss Egret’s loop!” I heard Emma say, running b
ehind us.
Caul’s voice narrated over the scene: “I am a god now, and these are my angels! You cannot keep us out. You cannot keep us from what is rightfully ours! And we have such gifts to bestow upon you, if only you’d let us! Renounce your false mothers! Give up your ymbrynes! Reclaim your dignity, your freedom!”
The image in the sky changed back to Caul’s face as he broke into a strident, speechifying tone. “Freedom from loops, from the constraints of time that the bird-women have used to imprison you all these years. Yes, prison, prison, prison, that’s all most of you have known. Join me and I will free you, my children!”
Threats and promises, manipulation and misinformation; Caul’s signature style.
He disappeared, finally, in a spray of blue light, and then something was snowing down on us. Some new desolation.
We were nearly back to the house.
I realized that what was falling were papers, and something was printed on them.
We made it to the front stoop of Ditch House, where our other friends were waiting. Panting, Bronwyn eased us off her back and set us down. The papers had begun to cover the ground.
“Is he gone?” Claire cried. “Are we safe yet?”
“He was never here,” said Emma. “That was another of his transmissions.”
“If he wasn’t here, how’d he make it rain newspapers?”
“Same way he made it rain ash and ankle bones,” said Enoch.
A shaky voice rang out over the Acre’s many loudspeakers. “This is Miss Esmerelda Avocet. Everyone remain calm and return to your rooms. The Quilt is fully operational now, and Caul cannot reach us. Neither can any of his hollowgast. He’s only trying to scare you.” There was a scratchy sound and a brief whine of feedback, and then Miss Avocet came back to the microphone sounding flustered. “And don’t touch those papers, they’re nothing but propa—”
There was a staticky pop and the loudspeakers went quiet. A breeze picked up and blew the papers in drifts around our feet.
“Propa-what?” Hugh said, and bent to pick one up.
Bronwyn snatched at it—“Hugh, don’t”—but he dodged her.
“Propaganda,” I said, picking up one for myself. “God, look at this.”
It was a page of newspaper. Olive and Noor looked on as I turned it right side up. Across the top a headline screamed:
TWO-FACED YMBRYNES PROMISE LOOP FREEDOM TO CLAN LEADERS IN SECRET DEAL!
I looked up to see other peculiars on the streets around us also reading it.
“There’s more,” Emma said, tilting her face closer to the paper. Below the headline was an article, if you could call it that.
“What’s it say?” Bronwyn asked, then looked sheepish. “I’m a slow reader.”
Emma scanned the text and summarized. “It claims . . . let’s see here . . . that the ymbrynes told LaMothe, Parkins, and Leo Burnham that they would give them all loop freedom in exchange for a signed peace deal. But only them and no one else. And then . . .” Emma grimaced and shook her head. “The rest is just ranting on about how the ymbrynes are traitors and want to keep us all subservient and loop-trapped, et cetera—”
“Would they really do that?” Olive said. She looked hurt by the very suggestion. “They wouldn’t, would they?”
“Of course not!” Claire said, agitated. “Just the other day Miss Peregrine told us they still hadn’t figured out how to make the reset reaction safe.”
Emma balled the paper angrily and pitched it away. “It’s all lies. Consider the source.”
“I don’t know,” Hugh said. “It was a bit strange how all three clans suddenly agreed to peace, and even helped us at Gravehill—”
“It wasn’t exactly sudden,” Horace said. “They’d been negotiating for weeks.”
Noor added, “And how they got Leo to forgive me, or whatever, even after feeling so insulted—”
“That’s not strange, it’s self-interest,” Emma said. “They realized the wights were a threat to their people, too, and that we needed to work together to beat them.”
“That sounds reasonable,” I said, “and I’d agree with you—if anything the clans ever did was reasonable.”
“Who cares if the ymbrynes did make an offer?” said Enoch, and we turned to see him walking toward us with one of the papers in his hand. “It got us what we needed. Peace and a partnership.”
“We care because it would’ve meant they lied,” Olive said. “That all the times they told the people who want loop freedom that it wasn’t possible, wasn’t safe yet—that that wasn’t true.”
Enoch shrugged. “So? We’ve got it, and that’s all I really care about.”
“Ymbrynes! Don’t! LIE!” shouted a red-faced Claire.
“All right, we heard you, loudness isn’t an effective argumentation tactic,” said Emma.
“YES! IT! IS!”
The door to the house creaked open and Fiona came out in a robe. She gave us a sleepy smile and a wave, then cast a concerned look around at all the papers on the ground and the strange new green cast to the sky. She was still recovering from the strain of our hollowgast encounter, and had slept through everything.
“It’s easy to forget what freedom means when you already have it,” Hugh said, and he shot a glare at Enoch, bounded up the front steps to join Fiona, and disappeared into the house with her.
“What climbed up his craw and died?” Enoch said.
“Not all of us are free, remember?” Emma said. “Fiona’s still loop-trapped.”
Enoch frowned. “Right.”
“But how do you know the ymbrynes weren’t lying to the clan leaders about giving them loop freedom?” Noor asked.
“Because they’re—” I started to reply, but cut myself short as a patrol of Americans led by LaMothe marched by. LaMothe looked furious, and had one of the papers balled in his fist. A few of his coat-raccoons glared at us in passing. When they were out of range, I whispered, “Because they’re still here.”
The two home guards assigned to Noor and I came striding toward us. “There you are,” the taller one huffed. “You mustn’t leave us behind anymore!”
“The ymbrynes want to see you in their chambers at once,” said the other.
Just then, a paper fluttered past my face and smacked flat against the wall of the house, pinned there as if by a gust, though I hadn’t felt even a puff of breeze. It was a poster with the faces of all the Ymbryne Council members in a row like a police lineup, the word GUILTY stamped across each one.
Olive said, “More propa—”
“Oh, shut up!” barked Emma. She went to rip down the poster, but it slid up the wall away from her before she could nab it, then off to one side when she tried again. She leapt at it and finally managed to tear it down, then ignited it in her hands—but as soon as she’d crumpled and tossed away the burning paper, five more just like it blew in and slapped against the wall all around her.
She let out a cry of frustration and turned to face the guards. “We’re all going to see the ymbrynes. I need to know what’s going on.”
As we hurried to keep up with the long strides of the guards, the ymbrynes’ faces followed us. Every few seconds another GUILTY poster flew in as if on some magical breeze to paper a nearby wall or lamppost. Guilty, guilty, guilty, like a drumbeat. I could see it happening all over: Posters were chasing people down the street, smacking people in the head.
Not all of us had come. Claire had refused to be a part of what seemed like a confrontation of the ymbrynes. Hugh had joined Fiona, still resting in the house. Horace was clearly exhausted by the events of the day but also said our cause would be better served by him taking a sleeping dram and going to bed, in the hopes that he might have some useful prophetic dreams.
At the ministries building a small but rowdy crowd swarmed the cobblestoned forecourt. They were waving the paper
s and demanding to be let in, while a phalanx of guards prevented them from reaching the massive iron doors. But they let my friends and me right through.
“I want to know what this means!” a woman shouted as she brandished the paper. “If it’s true, I’m going to—”
“What?” said Emma, aiming a flaming finger at the woman’s nose. “Overthrow the ymbrynes? Go out there and surrender to Caul?”
Before the woman could respond, a red-faced man shoved her out of the way. “You!” he shouted, a jet of literal steam coming out of his ears. “Tell your birds to get out here and talk to us. We deserve to know what’s going on.”
Enoch rounded on him. “They’re working themselves to death trying to save us from Caul, that’s what going on!”
Emma gaped at him in surprise.
“Let’s not stop and argue with every hothead in the Acre,” I said, and pushed both of them up the steps toward the iron doors, which heaved open with a great squeaking complaint.
“Haven’t you got bigger things to worry about?” Enoch shouted over his shoulder as we slipped inside. “Ungrateful slobs!”
The doors thundered closed. Enoch slapped the wall in anger.
“Why, Enoch, I didn’t know you cared what people thought of the birds,” said Emma.
“I don’t,” he said, embarrassed and rubbing his hand.
“So it’s fine if you talk rubbish about the birds,” Olive said with a grin, “but if anyone else dares to—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he grumbled, and followed the waiting guards.
We were escorted through the cavernous entrance hall, empty but for a few office workers, its service windows shuttered. Then down a long, gloomy passage to the Ymbryne Council chamber room, where another pair of guards was posted outside. A sign tacked above the big wooden door read QUIET, PLEASE!