by Ransom Riggs
The bearskin man dutifully kicked the legs off a small table.
“That’s quite enough of your temper tantrums!” Miss Cuckoo shouted, and then six more home guards burst into the room and surrounded the Americans. “See them out, please. And if they break anything or threaten anyone along the way, lock them in the jail.”
“Git’cher damn hands offa me!” Parkins yelled, wrenching away from one of the Guards. “I’m a-goin’. Come on, fellas.”
“You ain’t heard the last of us!” LaMothe shouted as they were escorted out.
Miss Peregrine shook her head. “Such disappointing little men.”
As the Americans’ shouts echoed down the hall, I wondered how much worse off we’d be without them fighting by our side. I didn’t get far with this train of thought, though, because no sooner had their voices disappeared than Perplexus’s assistant, Matthieu, ran into the room, breathless.
“Madams,” he cried. “We have news!” He doubled over, panting.
Before he could say what it was, Millard came charging in as well, his blue robe billowing behind him, rolled-up maps under his arms.
“Perplexus has found a route,” he announced. “Fast, but very unpleasant. He will explain.”
And then history’s most famous temporal cartographer rushed in behind him—Perplexus himself, muttering in Italian, arms piled high with still more maps. “Saluti signore,” he said, bowing to the ymbrynes.
He was trailed closely by Francesca, who was trying to catch papers as they slipped out of his hands. The whole tower began to tip, and he reached the conference table just in time for them to topple across it.
“Mi scusi,” Perplexus apologized, chasing the maps into a pile and giving me a perfunctory nod hello, though I couldn’t see his eyes behind the little round sunglasses he always wore.
Together he and Millard unrolled a map of Europe that covered the ymbrynes’ map of London.
“Miss Tern’s loop is the meeting place, we are quite sure,” Perplexus said, switching to heavily accented English. He patted his pockets as he spoke, looking for something. “It existed for three years only, during the Great War, which is a molto, molto piccolo window of time, in terms of leapfrogging . . . very difficult to find.”
“Miss Tern’s loop collapsed over a hundred years ago,” Millard said, “so in order to enter it we must find a loop that existed contemporaneously with hers and which also survives to this day. But there are precious few left of that vintage.”
“It was a terrible time for peculiars,” Miss Peregrine explained, mostly for the benefit of Noor and me. “The war was tearing apart Europe, and the hollows had only begun hunting us in earnest a few years earlier; it took some time to understand what we were dealing with and how best to defend against it.”
“Long tale short,” said Millard, “there are only three loops that might work.”
“Do you need something?” said Miss Wren asked Perplexus, who was still searching his pockets.
“I had a vial,” he said, “of espresso.” A drop of sweat slid down his pale brow.
Miss Avocet snapped her fingers. “Someone get the man a strong coffee.” A guard saluted her and dashed from the room.
“We were quite hoping to find a route that didn’t involve crossing through any war zones,” Millard continued. “Or very much of one.”
“One candidate is in Mongolia,” Perplexus said, dabbing his face with his heavy black coat sleeve before using Miss Cuckoo’s chalk-stick to point at the map. “Safe, as we discussed, but quite far away. It would require two weeks’ travel to reach Miss Tern’s loop in France.”
“Time we can’t afford to take,” said Miss Avocet.
Perplexus slid the pointer southwest. “The second is in the Adriatic Sea, 1918. Much closer.” It had stopped on an island somewhere between Italy and Greece. “But it’s on a lazzaretto . . . a quarantine island.”
“Not only is it heavily guarded, but it’s also infested with Spanish flu,” said Millard. “We can’t risk you dying of sickness, and even if we could guarantee your safety in that regard, the journey would take five days, so on balance it isn’t worth the risk.”
The guard returned cradling a tiny cup in his hands. “Espresso,” he said, handing it to Perplexus, who drained it in two grateful gulps.
“Ahhh,” he said, steam escaping his lips. “When you’re as old as I am, coffee’s practically the only thing keeping you alive.”
“And the third loop?” I said, an anxious clench building in my chest.
“Much closer,” said Millard. “Practically on top of Miss Tern’s loop. Only ten miles away.”
“But there’s a catch,” Noor guessed.
“Isn’t there always,” I muttered.
“Miss Tern’s loop is on one side of the fighting, and this circa 1918 loop, belonging to a Miss Hawksbill, is on the other.” He pointed to a loop in northern France. “A sea route is out of the question; it’s blocked by warships, patrolled by submarines, and would take too long, anyway. The best route is overland straight across the front lines—one of the worst hells the twentieth century ever made.”
There was a pause, and after a few seconds Noor realized the room was looking at her. She stiffened. “What? I haven’t changed my mind.”
Enoch leaned toward her. “It’s trench warfare. Bullets, bombs, gas, disease. You’d need a miracle to survive that.”
She looked at him like he was a little slow. “Then we’ll have to arrange for one.” She turned to the ymbrynes. “It’s not like there’s a choice. Right?”
The ymbrynes shook their heads.
I was sure, then, that I wanted to know Noor Pradesh for the rest of my life. However short or long that turned out to be. And then a new thought entered my mind and a cold wave of dread brushed my heart.
“I want to talk to you in private,” I said.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” she said, but I persuaded her to step away from the table with me anyway.
“You don’t have to do this,” I whispered.
“No, you don’t. But I do. I let that monster out.”
“You didn’t—”
“We’re not going to argue this again. I’m the only one here who can send Caul back where he came from. There’s no choice. Not for me, anyway. If it kills me, it kills me. But you don’t have to come. In fact, I’d rather you lived. I did this. It’s my fight.”
The idea of letting her do this alone, the mere thought, filled me with physical revulsion. “There’s no way you’re going without me.”
“Or me,” said Bronwyn, stepping toward us.
Emma joined her side. “Or me.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Noor said. “You guys don’t have to—”
“You won’t get five hundred feet without my maps knowledge,” said Millard, his blue robe swishing around the table toward us. “It’s my route, and I should be there to help you navigate it.”
Addison left his place by Miss Wren’s side and marched solemnly over to us. “I lived in a menagerie loop most of my life. If anyone can help you negotiate Miss Tern’s loop, it’s me.”
Enoch sighed testily and said, “I’m not about to be left here twisting in the wind. I’ll be so bored.”
“Well, if you’re all going—” Olive began, but so many of us shouted “No!” in unison that she didn’t even finish her sentence.
She looked hurt.
“Sorry, Olive,” said Emma. “Big kids only.”
The ymbrynes were looking at us with odd expressions, a mix of pride and fear. Miss Peregrine looked proudest of all, but she’d gone white as a bedsheet.
“Alma, do you approve of this?” asked Miss Avocet.
In reply, she only nodded.
It was decided that we were to leave that night, in just a few hours. There was no time to waste; with
every hour that passed, Caul only got stronger, and our chances of surviving the attack he was surely preparing slimmed. Miss Cuckoo, Miss Wren, and Miss Peregrine accompanied us out of the council chamber and downstairs to the costuming department. From a vast room filled with hanging racks, Gaston, the costuming department director, chose period-appropriate outfits for each of us, all shades of brown and green that would blend into the turned earth of a battlefield, and hopefully attract minimal attention from either the British and French soldiers near Miss Hawksbill’s loop, or the Germans after we crossed the front lines.
While we tried on clothes, we gathered in a cluster around the dressing room and the ymbrynes talked to us about what would happen when we crossed over. They tried to hide their nervousness, but it showed in the way Miss Peregrine kept fiddling with the pins in her upswept hair, in Miss Cuckoo’s tapping foot, and in Miss Wren’s uncharacteristic quiet. The fact was, there wasn’t a lot they could tell us. They didn’t know Miss Hawksbill well, but Miss Cuckoo repeated several times that under no circumstances should we attempt to cross the front lines to find the entrance to Miss Tern’s loop without her help.
“She will surely know a safe passage,” Miss Peregrine said, “having maintained a loop there for the better part of a century.”
But she sounded more hopeful than certain, and the fact that I’d never heard of Miss Hawksbill before a few minutes ago made me think she might be an odd duck, and not very helpful at all.
“All wrong, Gaston, all wrong,” Miss Cuckoo said impatiently, wrinkling her nose at my outfit. “The jacket makes him looks too much like a soldier.”
I shrugged out of the jacket and Gaston disappeared into the racks again.
“I wish I could go with you,” Miss Cuckoo said. “I’m from the north of France, and I know the area where you’re heading fairly well. Not in wartime, but still—”
“I would give both my wings to accompany you,” Miss Peregrine said heavily. “But all twelve ymbrynes must stay here in the Acre, or the Quilt and its protections will falter.”
“Don’t worry about us, miss, we’ll be back before you know it,” Bronwyn said, and smiled.
Miss Peregrine forced a smile in return.
We returned to Ditch House without the ymbrynes to pack and rest a little before the journey, and leaving the ministries building we were forced to pass through the restless crowd outside its doors. Behind us, Francesca made an announcement through a bullhorn that the ymbrynes would address them soon. In a few minutes, this tempest in a teakettle would fade away—but so too would the reinforcements and extra muscle that the Americans had provided, who I assumed would be leaving along with their leaders. All the more reason we had to stop Caul before he found a way to break through the ymbrynes’ shield.
Back at the house, Claire started to cry when we told her about our new mission. Fiona and Hugh solemnly wished us luck. “I knew they wouldn’t let you go without taking some of us along,” Hugh said, translating for Fiona. She felt her place was here, standing with the ymbrynes in defense of the Acre, and naturally Hugh wasn’t about to leave her side. I was sure he would’ve tried to stop her even if she’d wanted to go with us, having already lost and regained the love of his life once this year. After all that, the idea of Fiona risking her safety in the trenches of one of the century’s deadliest wars would’ve been too much to bear. Not that staying in the Acre was any guarantee of safety; far from it.
Horace was the last to find out. He’d been sitting in bed in a half-sleep trance, moaning and whispering to himself, and when we woke him out of it he leapt up and started chattering about how he might’ve discovered a way to block Caul’s transmissions.
“They’re on the same psychic wavelength that my prestidigitations travel on, which means they’re akin to a mass hallucination, something we see with our minds rather than our eyes—” He stopped suddenly, blinking at all of us. “Hullo, what are you all doing in my bedroom?”
Emma started to tell him, but he quickly cut her off. “Never mind, you don’t have to tell me—I dreamed it,” he said, snapping his fingers and letting his eyes fall shut. “France. Miss . . . Cranesbill. No, Hawksbill. Death everywhere, heavy in the air.” He opened his eyes. “Right. I’m coming with you.”
“Um,” Emma said, “that’s very kind of you, Horace, but—”
“Why don’t you just knit us some bulletproof sweaters?” Enoch said.
“That isn’t nice,” said Bronwyn, who’d been trying to fit all the books Millard said he needed into one large steamer trunk. “Horace has been through lots of battles with us. Ain’t that right?”
“I detest war and fighting,” he said, “but I’m coming nevertheless. You’re going to need me. I’m not sure why yet, but it’s not for my knitting skills.” And he started to look around for a backpack to fill.
We had underestimated him yet again.
Noor had been avoiding my eyes ever since we’d left the council chamber, I think because she didn’t want me to tell her, for the hundredth time, that she didn’t need to do this. But I was past that now. She was the only indispensable part of all this. The ymbrynes’ shield could fail and the Acre could fall, but as long as she found the other six, there was a chance everything could be put right again. But she didn’t need me reminding her of that. Her way of bearing the pressure seemed to be to not think too much about it. Just go, just do. So I let her go, helped her do, and let her avoid my eyes for a while.
Perplexus and Millard had lugged the maps back to Ditch House and spread them across the kitchen table again, where they were going over them one last time. Perplexus looked half avian, with map pages poking out of his jacket and the waistband of his pants, and the table was littered with drained espresso cups. We let them work in peace.
After an anxious hour, Miss Peregrine returned, pushing Miss Avocet in her wheelchair. They called Noor, Horace, and me into the sitting room to talk. A fire was kindled in the hearth and Miss Avocet was parked beside it, her head propped on pillows, her eyes tired but alert. V’s body was still on the gurney by the darkened window, encased now in an ice-filled coffin. It felt wrong, keeping her like this, but there’d been too much chaos and no time to give her a funeral. And I suspected the ymbrynes wanted to keep her close at hand in the unlikely event that we needed to ask her more questions.
Miss Peregrine invited us to sit on the floor cushions. She stood backlit before the crackling hearth while she spoke. “A few final notes. We’ll be restarting the Panloopticon very briefly, just long enough for you to cross over. We cannot send advance word of your arrival to Miss Hawksbill, lest we risk the message being intercepted. So you’ll have to locate her when you enter her loop.”
“I hope she’s home,” I said.
“She is,” Horace replied. We didn’t need to ask him how he knew.
“Isn’t it dangerous to restart the Panloopticon?” Emma asked.
Miss Peregrine nodded. “Yes, but it’s only for thirty seconds or so, a calculated risk we have to take.”
“Does anyone know yet what I’m supposed to do when I find the other six?” asked Noor.
Miss Avocet struggled to sit up straight. “I had hoped Francesca and our translators would uncover something new in the Apocryphon that might be useful in that regard, but alas. We aren’t certain how the seven go about sealing shut the door, but the one who summoned you there—whoever made those six phone calls—will likely know.”
“Goodness, I should hope so,” said Horace.
“We’ll take you all to the Panloopticon shortly,” said Miss Peregrine. “No one else in the Acre must know what you’re up to. We cannot risk word of your mission making its way back to Caul or the wights. We’ve no way of knowing whether the wights we’re still holding in our jail have psychic connections with Caul. If he were to find out, he’d surely come after you. So to that end, we’ll be sneaking you into the Panloopticon o
ne by one in shipping crates.”
“Excuse me?” said Horace.
Miss Peregrine ignored him. “Once you cross through into 1918, you’ll have no way of contacting me or this loop, nor should you try; again, the risk of alerting our enemies is too great. You’ll be cut off and entirely on your own.” She’d been facing the fire for much of her short speech, but now she turned to look at us. She was nearly in tears. “If I should never see you again . . .”
Horace jumped up and put his arms around her. “You will, miss. You will.”
“Are you just saying that, Mr. Somnusson?”
“I’m not. I know it,” he said. And whether or not it was true, it was what we all needed to hear.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
I was about to follow the ymbrynes and Horace out into the kitchen when Noor tugged at my hand. “Wait.” She looked back toward the window, and the ice-filled coffin that lay in shadow beneath it.
I was hit by a sudden wave of shame. “We’ll bury her soon as we can.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “I’d like to talk to her again before we go.”
“She won’t be able to hear you.”
She hugged herself. “I know. But I still want to.”
I took a breath, aware suddenly of the faint scent of formaldehyde in the air. Aware, too, that despite the loss of my grandfather, I could never fully understand what Noor was feeling. To lose a loved one you’d only just been reunited with.
She took my hand. “Will you stay?”
“Okay. If you want.” We crossed the room to where V lay.
Noor knelt beside the ice-filled coffin. I stayed close enough to lend support without invading Noor’s space.
“Mama, I’m going away now. I’m going to find Penny. I don’t know when I’ll be back again . . .” She dug into the ice with her fingers and fished out V’s hand, blue from death and cold, kneading it as she talked. I think she said I love you and I’m sorry, but I was trying not to listen, because it felt too private and because it was hurting my heart.