by Ransom Riggs
them.
They were still alive. Noor, Emma, and Horatio. By some miracle we had all survived the blast, wrapped in an armor of hollows—who were themselves armored, chests and backs thickened by a steely exoskeletal plate. Many had been killed, and many more had been injured beyond usefulness, but judging by the dizzying number of paths into which my mind diverged, there were at least a dozen undamaged hollows now under my command.
The feeling was not altogether alien. It had happened once before: a collective brain reboot that had fused my mind with a nest of hollows, allowing me to move beyond my shaky grasp on their language to tap into the unconscious heart of my power—and into them. It did not seem to matter that these hollows were new. Despite their differences with hollows of the past, their deepest minds were the same. This was not merely control, but inhabitation. I acted as them, experienced a dulled version of their pains, saw through their eyes as well as my own. At first it was terrifying, this feeling that I was at once nowhere and everywhere, my me-ness rippling through all of them like a deck of cards being shuffled.
One of me, underwater, was staring at a star-shaped hole in the wall where the sea was rushing in, pale, filtered light gleaming on the other side.
Our escape.
Grab on to me, I tried to say as Jacob. Take a deep breath. But the words came out wrong, through the wrong mouth, and I had to stop thinking for a moment, and focus, and find myself. There I was: staring vacantly while my friends panicked.
Dropping back into myself felt like slipping into old, comfortable clothes.
“Everyone grab on to me and take a deep breath!”
This time they heard me and did as I asked.
I gathered my hollows. They clustered around us in a pod, lassoed our waists, and pulled us underwater. I hardly even had to think about what I wanted them to do, and it was done.
I hadn’t lost my touch.
The hollows were surprisingly agile swimmers. Their tongues rippled like fins and grabbed hold of things to pull us along. In a moment we were gliding through the jagged hole that had been blasted in the wall, then down a hallway that was flooded to its ceiling. If we’d tried to swim it on our own we surely would have drowned, but the hollows powered us through the water so quickly my cheeks fluttered against the current.
We shot up a flooded staircase, breaking through to the surface halfway up. After that we were carried in a nest of withered arms and muscled tongues, our feet never touching the ground.
We burst through a door and onto the deck. The ship was listing badly to one side, the deck tilting like a ramp. The hollows swarmed around us, thrilled to breathe open air again, angry because anger was their nature, hating me but ready to do anything I commanded. There were so many of them—more than I’d thought, more than I’d been able to count—thirty-five, maybe forty hollows. They leapt in the air, drummed the deck with their tongues. A wight ran into their midst and started shouting orders. Before he could finish his sentence, they’d wrenched his head off and thrown it into the Thames.
I had the hollows set us down. There was a burst of gunfire from the tilting waterslide and a ricochet answered behind us. I pushed my friends back into the sheltering stairwell and blocked the entry with two hollows, then sent the rest to go clear the ship of enemies.
Within a minute it was done: three men with guns disarmed and torn to pieces, the turncoat peculiar who’d been controlling them flung onto the shuffleboard deck with his back shattered. Another wight had surrendered at the ship’s controls with his hands up and his knees trembling.
The ship, or what was left of it, was ours. Now we just had to find a way off it.
“Climb aboard,” I said, kneeling two hollows for Noor and Emma to mount.
“I’d rather walk,” said Noor.
“It’s perfectly safe when Jacob’s in control,” Emma said. “And much faster.” She hopped onto the hollow’s back, and it secured her with a quick wrap of its tongue around her waist.
“It really is,” Horatio agreed, climbing on behind Emma.
“You can ride with me,” I offered, and when I mounted the second hollow she gave in and climbed on behind me.
“This is a dream, right?” she whispered in my ear.
And then we took off.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
A police helicopter was circling the ship at low altitude. Sirens were approaching. At some point while my friends and I were trapped in the cargo hold, the ship had docked at an industrial port along the Thames, where enormous oil tanks loomed beyond a maze of ships.
My squadron of hollows carried us to the edge of the railing. I hoped they could swing us down to the dock, but it was a long way. I sent two hollows to find some rope—shouldn’t be hard to come by on a boat—while I exercised the rest, making them jump and tumble around the deck to shake off the last of their dust-induced sleep and strengthen my connection to them. It was a surreal scene, no question, though its strangeness was dulled somewhat by my fractured state of mind. My connection to so many hollows at once occasionally threatened to overwhelm me, and mental noise faded in and out like a staticky radio signal.
“Jacob! Where have you gone?” I’m not sure how long Emma had been trying to talk to me, but the alarm in her voice made me think it had been a while.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head and popping my jaw, which had been clenched tight in concentration.
Horatio sat astride his hollow’s rounded back like a master horseman, and he was smiling. At me.
“What is it?” I said.
“You’re quite a specimen, Jacob Portman.” He watched a hollowgast do an acrobatic flip off the top of the waterslide, then turned again to face me. “I think Abraham Portman was right about you.”
“My grandfather?” I said, leaning forward. “Why, what did he say?”
“That you could be the most powerful peculiar of our times, were you given the opportunity to prove yourself.” His smile faded. “But it would come hand in hand with terrible danger.”
Danger he never wanted me to face.
The hollowgast did another flip off the waterslide. The two I’d sent to find rope hadn’t returned yet. I made the hollow that was guarding the surrendered wight in the control room drag him out, and thirty seconds later they appeared, the hollow pulling the wight along by his hair, the wight screeching and pathetic.
He was begging for his life.
I ignored him, because a tug at my attention told me that the two hollows who’d gone to find rope had encountered someone unexpected.
I heard his voice through their ears.
“Hullo, my lovelies, what are you doing out and about? Oh, you’ve been very bad . . .”
And then he rose into view off the side of the ship, suspended in midair upon a tornadic pedestal of racing black wind.
Caul.
Noor stiffened at the sight. Emma swore.
He was giant now, a stretched and distended corruption of a man from the torso up, a violent storm from the waist down. His arms were normal, but his fingers were ten thick and wriggling tree roots, turning whatever they touched to rot.
He was screaming something about revenge, something about living forever, and as he did, he turned his hands upward and his long fingers shot toward the sky. And then a gang of deranged, ambro-enhanced peculiars began scrambling over the railings of the ship to attack us.
The first to make it on board spat a stream of liquid metal at the nearest hollow, and as the creature’s brain melted under the spray, I felt its consciousness wink out. But then three more leapt on the ambro addict and in an instant he was dead. Then more of Caul’s minions came, and with each a new scourge: One called down a cloud of acid that burned one of my hollows, another had incredible strength, two of them working together made a bolt of red lightning that left a hole in the chest of another hollo
w and streaked close over our heads, sizzling the air and leaving a scent like burned hair. My hollows swarmed them like rabid animals, overwhelming eight, nine, ten of these powerful, ambrosia-enhanced traitors in the space of a minute while the two hollows that my friends and I rode fell back to a safer distance.
When that wave of the attack had ended, I had lost three hollows, and no less than ten of Caul’s addicts lay sprawled on the deck, dead or nearly so.
Caul was furious. With a roar of wind he flew across the gap and onto the boat, where he hovered just above the deck while his miniature tornado ripped apart the wood below him and sucked chairs and debris into its funnel.
So much for not being able to cross water. It seemed Caul too had evolved, and quickly.
Before he could get his bearings I sent three hollows sprinting toward him. Caul reached out his arms and entangled them in his long fingers, then lifted them off their feet and clutched them to his upper body—now twice their size—like they were babies. I forced their mouths open, but couldn’t get their tongues to attack him; Caul was whispering to them, and their will to obey me was quickly fading.
“What’s going on?” Noor said, panicking as they all went limp in Caul’s arms. “Why aren’t they killing him?”
I wanted to explain, but my mind was too occupied. Something bad was happening. I felt the tendrils of Caul’s influence flowing backward through those three hollows and into my own brain.
Hello, Jacob.
I closed my eyes and put everything I had into pushing Caul out of my mind. But my attention was too divided.
Kill the girl.
At this, I felt the hollow Noor and I were riding flinch, then tense, and I had to devote all my focus to reasserting total control over it, lest it unwrap its tongues from our waists and circle them around Noor’s throat.
After a moment, it relaxed again. But Caul’s influence was insidious and his possible entry points into my brain were scattered across the deck.
I had thirty-four hollows left, but I let go, temporarily, of thirty-one of them to put everything I had in the two we were riding and the hollow closest to Caul’s face. All the rest went limp and slack as I relaxed my grip on their minds, and there was a great collective thud as they collapsed to the deck.
“Oh my God!” Emma cried. “What’s happening to them?”
I didn’t have the bandwidth to reply. I had narrowed all my focus to Caul and the two hollows. It was enough: I shoved Caul out of my mind, stopped the hollow we were riding from trying to kill Noor, then regained control of the one most immediately in Caul’s grip. As I wrenched open that hollow’s mouth I could hear Caul yelling, “Stop there, what are you doing—”
I sent all four of its tongues at him. One each through his blue-glowing eye sockets, the other two into his open mouth, with such power that they punched through the back of his throat.
Caul lolled backward drunkenly, gagging. His wind slowed and he began to crumple, the life going out of him. He sank into the puddle and was swallowed up by it, taking with him the three hollows in his arms; I could feel them dying as they all disappeared together.
For a moment, it was quiet but for the helicopter and the whine of approaching sirens.
“The blue light!” Noor cried, and I could feel her body starting toward it. “If I can just—”
“Don’t fall for it!” Emma said. “He’s pretended to be dead before. That’s how he got Julius!”
As if on cue, Caul burst from the hole like some nightmarish Jack-in-the-box, the blast of wind that propelled him blowing back our hair and tumbling chairs across the deck. He seemed even larger than before, and absolutely unscathed. He’d retreated to his hole and regenerated himself in mere seconds.
“A thousand hollows couldn’t stop me!” he bellowed. “Death only makes me stronger!”
He was really starting to piss me off.
“Yeah?” I said quietly. “Let’s test that theory.”
I bowed my head, closed my eyes. I felt a strange power course through me as my mind split, fled itself, and flew into the limp bodies of twenty-nine hollowgast. They shuddered awake like old cars starting in the cold, then rose to their feet, one after another.
Despite his claims, twenty-nine was apparently more hollowgast than Caul wanted to tangle with at once, and he began rearing backward toward the railing. “It’s been such fun seeing you again,” he called out. “I’d love to stay and play, but I’ve got a date with old friends—”
“You’ll never get through their shield!” Emma shouted at him.
A smile flickered across Caul’s face. “That reminds me. Carlo, if you wouldn’t mind?”
The wight I’d forgotten about shoved back his sleeve and barked into a smartwatch: “Vigsby, this is Eagle! Strike now! I repeat—”
I caught his wrist with a hollow’s tongue and wrenched it so far behind his back I heard the arm break. But it was too late: Whatever message he’d meant to send had been sent.
Briefly distracted, I hadn’t noticed Caul entangling the hollow closest to him with his long fingers, and immediately I felt its life fading. Through its ears I heard Caul whisper, “Come home, sweetheart, you were always my favorite.”
The other twenty-eight were running at him flat-out, but before they could reach him, Caul’s wind propelled him high into the air. Nearly a hundred tongues whipped at him but all missed. He let the dead hollow drop, then waggled his long fingers at us in a teasing toodle-oo. “To be continued, eh?”
With that, he arched his back and flung himself farther skyward—because of course he could fly now—then flipped his tornado’s funnel at the rotors of the police helicopter that had been buzzing overhead.
It lost control and began to spin toward us.
I made the hollows we were riding dive for cover as the helicopter tumbled, decapitating the waterslide before it fell out of sight and crashed into the river.
The moment plastic debris stopped raining down, Noor wriggled out of the tongue-belt’s embrace, slid off our hollow’s back, and ran to the broken-armed wight. He was on his knees. Whatever call he’d made on his watch was still connected. On the other end I could hear screams and chaos.
“Who’s Vigsby?” Noor shouted in his face. “What did you do?”
His blank expression spread into a grin.
Emma ran up beside us, panicking. “I just placed the name. She’s one of Miss Babax’s wards!”
“I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now,” said the wight. “She was one of ours. And a skilled assassin.”
Through his watch we heard a name shouted crisply in anguish: “Ravenna!”
“That’s Miss Babax’s name,” Emma cried. “Oh my God—”
Noor gasped. “That means our shield—”
“Is no more!” the wight said. “And soon Master Caul will reclaim our rightful home—and make a stack of your bodies for the fire!”
Emma smacked him in the mouth with a ball of flame. He stumbled away howling, head like a lit match, then tripped backward into a hot tub.
“We have to get to the Acre now,” Emma said. “Before it’s too late!”
But we all knew the awful truth: It was probably too late already.
The hollows surrounded us, keyed up and mouth-breathing heavily, their dripping black eye sockets slicking the deck beneath our feet. Noor edged against me, rigid. I assured her I had them under control, and she claimed to believe me, but I knew from experience that it was next to impossible to switch off the instinct to run from a hollowgast—especially one you could see.
There was no rope to be found. I would have to improvise a way to reach the docks below. I told my friends to hang on tight. We mounted the hollows. Sharon had almost certainly fled in his boat after Caul appeared.
At my command, twenty-eight hollows ran down the slanting deck to the rail and leapt
overboard. They chained themselves together while falling, unfolding themselves into a bridge leading down to the docks. I had the two remaining hollows strap us onto their backs tighter than ever, and then we leapt overboard, skittering along the hollow-bridge and down to the dock with a quickness that made Emma squeal and left me light-headed.
Finally back on dry land, I herded the other hollows into a circle of protection around our two, and, in that formation, we took off running. The hollows were fast, and used their tongues almost exclusively to power themselves along, which acted like shocks and made the ride not unlike being on the back of a fast horse—only this was an animal I was psychically connected to, and my confidence level on hollow-back was much higher.
Finding the Acre wasn’t hard: Caul had left us a block-wide trail of destruction to follow. All along the way he’d ripped up cars and shattered windows, had raked his deathly arms over anyone he saw, leaving dozens of normals lying sickened and gray amid the wreckage. Fires, smoke, bodies—it seemed cruel even for Caul, and bafflingly secondary to his real goal. A waste of time. But then I saw the way people screamed and ran from our monstrous troupe, as I’m sure they had run from Caul himself, and I realized he was terrorizing people for the same reason he’d made his new hollows visible: to make normals fear and hate us. He was sowing the seeds of an apocalyptic war, the kind the Revelator’s prophecy foretold. One that would force us all to choose sides, and fight if only to defend ourselves.
But first things first.
We made quick progress across the city. Fortunately, we didn’t have far to go; the ship had docked less than a mile from the Acre’s loop entrance. I hoped Bronwyn and the light-eaters had made it to the safe house, but we wouldn’t be meeting them there as we’d promised. There was no time.
As we got close to the Acre, the destruction grew worse. When we turned down the narrow tributary of the Thames that led to the loop entrance, it became total. The glass-walled office buildings and apartments that lined the river had sustained massive damage. There were bodies floating in the water and scattered along the concrete banks. Some of the dead were normals, just innocent bystanders. A few were ambro addicts, their eyes still glowing white even while their life drained away. Others I recognized as peculiars who’d been posted outside the Acre to defend its loop entrance.