A Map of Days

by Ransom Riggs

  “And that’s when you knew?” said Emma. “That you were different?”

  “No, no, I thought there was a ghost in the room with me or something.” A quick and vanishing smile glanced across her face, and then she shook her head. “I didn’t realize anything until a few days later. At El Taco Junior.”

  “Oh my God, right,” said Lilly. “That was the day?”

  “Mm-hmm. I had just gotten accepted into this accelerated student arts program at Bard. I never thought I had a chance, but you made me apply.”

  “You were always going to get in,” said Lilly. “Come on.”

  Noor shrugged. “It was for college credit and everything, but it cost three thousand dollars, which was exactly two thousand and six hundred dollars more than I had. So I was going to quit the after-school stuff and get that job at Ices Queen to pay for it. Fartface said ‘damn right’ I was getting that job, but the money I made was going to their household bills, not to pay for some college before I was even out of high school. So I reminded him that I had the legal right to an emancipation bank account, and he started yelling again, and anyway that’s when I ran away and met you at El Taco Junior.”

  “He followed her,” said Lilly, “and screamed at her right there in the restaurant. And then I started yelling at him, and I guess he couldn’t bring himself to scream at a blind girl in public, so he stormed off into the street to wait for us to finish.”

  “So we had the longest taco meal in history.”

  “We actually had time to finish the Macho Meal together,” said Lilly, “which we’d never done before because it’s forty-six hundred calories, but we sat there so long and I was just stress-eating . . .”

  “While he was standing in the street just staring at us. Finally, I got really upset and couldn’t take it anymore, and to keep from losing my shit with Fartface watching, I ran into the bathroom. And that’s where it happened. I could feel it building up in me, and I was about to scream, but this time I held it in. And the lights in the bathroom started to flicker and get weird, and I—I don’t know how to explain it, I just knew what to do. Knew I could. I reached out, reached above me, and scooped the light out of the air. And the whole room went dark, but the little space inside my hands was glowing like I had caught the world’s brightest firefly.”

  “That,” Enoch said, “is so wickedly cool.”

  “You’d think so,” said Noor. “But it was scary as hell. I thought my brain had broken. It started happening all the time, and at first I didn’t know how to control it. Whenever I’d get really upset—sad or pissed off about something—it would start to happen. And because school is so awful, it happened a lot at school. I could feel it coming, though, and I always managed to run away just in time, into some room where I could be alone and no one would see. I think a few people did notice something, though they couldn’t exactly connect it to me—they’d just see me looking upset and some lights flickering. But it was about then that they started coming around school. The new people.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I still don’t know. They looked like faculty, and the faculty seemed to treat them like they belonged on campus, but no one recognized them. At first they seemed to be watching everyone, but after a while I got the feeling they were looking for me. Then that thing in the auditorium happened, and then I knew for sure.”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  “We read about it in a newspaper,” said Millard, “but we’d love to hear your version of events.”

  “That was the worst day of my life. Well, maybe the second or third worst. I had an episode in the middle of a school assembly. It started out as one of those awful, mandatory things where they drone at you about school spirit, but then it turned into an assembly about me. Except they didn’t know it was me. They said someone had been vandalizing school property, breaking lightbulbs and burning things, and they said if the person was in the room they should stand up and apologize, and they wouldn’t be expelled. Otherwise, they would. And I started feeling sick, like I was sure they knew it was me but they were just messing with my head to see if I would confess. And then this girl in the row behind me—this total witch, Suze Grant—starts whispering that it was probably me since I came from a broken home, la la la, orphan girl from the wrong side of the tracks or whatever, vandalizing the school, and I could feel myself getting angry. Really, really angry.”

  “And that’s when it happened?” I said.

  “The auditorium has all these theater lights on the ceiling, and they all lit up at once, and then broke, and a ton of broken glass came down on everyone.”

  “Damn,” said Lilly. “I didn’t know it was like that.”

  “It was bad,” said Noor. “I knew I needed to get out there. So I made it dark, and I ran. And a couple of the fake faculty people started chasing me, and I could tell they were sure it was me, now. They chased me into the bathroom, and I had no choice but to let all the light I had taken out of that big auditorium go, all at once, right in their faces.”

  “What did they look like?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew already.

  “They’re so normal-looking they’re almost hard to describe,” said Noor.

  “Age? Height? Build? Race?”

  “Middle-aged. Middle height. Middle build. Mostly men, one or two ladies. A couple white, a couple brown.”

  “And how were they dressed?” asked Millard.

  “Polo shirts. Button-downs. A coat. Navy-blue or black, always. Like out of a catalog for average people with average jobs and no particular background.”

  “After you burned them, what did you do?” I asked.

  “I tried running back to my house, but they were waiting for me there, too. So I came here. Lucky for me, I’ve got a lot of experience hiding from people.”

  “The more I hear about these people,” said Bronwyn, “the less they sound like peculiars.”

  “They don’t sound at all like peculiars,” said Millard. “They sound like wights to me.”

  “Like whites?” said Noor, looking confused. “I just told you, some of them were brown.”

  “No, no, wights,” said Emma. “W-i-g-h-t. They used to be peculiar, turned themselves into monsters by accident, and have been our enemies for more than a century.”

  “Oh,” said Noor. “Well, that’s confusing.”

  “They couldn’t be wights,” I said. “There are too many of them. Wights work in small groups, or alone.”

  “And there aren’t even that many of them left anymore,” said Emma.

  “That we know of,” said Enoch.

  “I might have felt a hollow at the school yesterday,” I admitted.

  “What?” Emma shouted. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “The feeling only lasted a few seconds,” I said. “I wasn’t sure what it was. But if they were wights, they probably would’ve had at least one hollowgast traveling with them.”

  “Fellows, who they are isn’t the most important thing,” Millard said. “Getting Noor to safety is. Once that’s completed, we can argue till we’re blue about who the people in the polo shirts are.”

  “Safety?” said Noor. “Where’s that, exactly?”

  I looked at her. “A time loop.”

  She looked away and passed a hand across her forehead. The light in the corner flickered. “I guess after everything you’ve shown me, I should be ready to believe that, too. But—”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s a lot. And it comes at you fast.”

  “It’s not just a lot. It’s insane. I’d have to be out of my mind to go with you.”

  “You’ll just have to trust us,” Emma said.

  Noor looked at us for a few seconds. She started nodding. Then she said, “But I don’t.” She stood up and took a few steps toward the door. “I’m sorry. You seem nice enough, but I’m done
trusting people I barely know. Even if they can resurrect dead birds and make fire in their hands.”

  I looked at Emma and Bronwyn and Enoch. We were all quiet. I genuinely didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to argue with her, but I knew I had to say something. I couldn’t fail this way. I couldn’t fail her, couldn’t fail my grandfather, couldn’t fail my friends. Couldn’t fail myself. But as soon as I opened my mouth to speak, the building began to shake.

  The sensation was accompanied by the sound of a churning engine. There was a helicopter hovering above the building.

  * * *

  • • •

  We traded anxious looks, waiting for the roar of the helicopter to pass. Seconds ticked by, but it only grew louder. We knew what it meant without anyone having to say it. But I said it anyway.

  “They tracked us here.”

  Noor’s eyes flashed at me, angry and frightened. “Or did you lead them here?”

  Noor grasped Lilly by the arm and speed-walked her out of the room. We followed, pleading with them.

  “We didn’t lead them anywhere!” Millard said. “Not purposely, anyway—I’d swear on an ymbryne’s life!”

  We came into a larger room and stood looking up through an unglassed atrium that was open to the sky. Suddenly the helicopter lurched into view, blocking the sky and filling the room with noise and whipping downdraft from its rotors.

  A spotlight blasted down, blanching everything and casting stark shadows onto the floor. Noor stared straight up into it, her eyes fierce, seemingly ready to make a stand against these people, whoever they were, rather than follow us.

  “You’ve got to come with us!” I shouted. “There’s no other choice!”

  “Sure there is,” she shouted back, and she reached up with both hands and tore the light out of the air. The room around us and the space overhead went black, so that the only illumination came from a pinhole of sky above us and a glowing orb in Noor’s hands.

  Something dropped down from above, a small hissing object that tumbled through the blackness before bouncing with a sharp metal ting against the concrete floor. It began spraying a cloud of white smoke—tear gas or something similar.

  “Hold your breath!” Emma shouted.

  Lilly started to cough. Bronwyn scooped her up. “This is Bronwyn! I’m going to carry you!”

  Noor nodded her thanks to Bronwyn. “This way,” she said, and started at a run down one of the blacked-out hallways.

  We practically rode the back of her heels. Nobody wanted to be left behind in that unnatural dark. Sprinting to the end of the hall, we arrived at a T where we could go either left or right. Noor headed right and we followed her, but a second later we heard voices and heavy footsteps and two men wielding a bright light came around a corner up ahead.

  They shouted at us to stop. We heard an echoing pop and another canister came flying down the hall, landed near us, and sprayed gas everywhere.

  We all started to cough, then ran in the opposite direction. They weren’t trying to kill us, that much was clear. They wanted Noor alive. Maybe, at this point, they wanted all of us.

  “We need to get out of the building,” I shouted as we ran. “The stairs. Where are the stairs?”

  We rounded a corner and came to a dead end. Noor spun around and looked behind us.

  “Past those men,” she said, pointing in the direction of the footsteps.

  “We’re screwed,” I said. “I’ll have to use our Happy Meal prize . . .”

  I slung the duffel bag around to my front and started to reach inside for the grenade, but Noor didn’t seem at all fazed by our lack of escape options. “In here!” she shouted, ducking through a doorway and into a small room.

  We followed her in. There were no windows, no doors—no other exits.

  “We’re trapped in here!” I said, my hand inside the bag, gripping the grenade. I didn’t want to use it—what if it brought the building down on our heads?—but if given no other choice, I’d take the risk.

  “You asked me to trust you,” said Noor. “First, trust me.”

  The footsteps were growing louder and louder. I slipped my empty hand out of the bag. Noor pushed us into the corner, then stood in the center of the room and began to rake her hands through the air. With each pass of her hands the room around us grew darker by degrees, the little natural light that shone in from the hallway dimming and then disappearing altogether—into her hands. And then she took all that glowing concentrated light, stuffed it into her mouth, and swallowed it.

  I can only tell you what I saw, and it was one of the most peculiar things I’d ever witnessed. I watched that ball of light glow through her cheeks and travel down her throat and into her stomach, where her body seemed to absorb and dampen it, until finally, just as the footsteps were reaching the doorway, it disappeared completely. We were left standing in a blackness so total that when two men filled the doorway and aimed their blinding flashlights into the room, the dark seemed to reach out and wrap itself around them. Their lights were reduced to pinpricks, and they stumbled into the room half blind, one whacking the light against his hand while the other spoke into a crackling walkie-talkie.

  “Subjects are on level six. Repeat, level six.”

  We pressed our backs to the wall, silent, hardly daring to breathe. We were so hidden by the enveloping dark that I really thought they might not find us. And they might not have, except for one thing.

  My phone. It was set to vibrate, but even muffled inside my bag, it made noise—a tiny humming sound that gave us away instantly.

  Everything that happened after that unfolded with incredible speed. The men both dropped to one knee. The words firing position flitted through my head just as Noor made a sudden guttural growl, and the light she’d been holding in her stomach shot up into her throat and burst forth from her mouth toward the two men in a blast that looked—even with my face turned and my eyes shut—like a thousand flashbulbs going off at once. I felt a wave of heat. I heard the men scream and fall. When I opened my eyes again, every inch of the room was alive with bright white light, and the men were on the ground clutching their faces.

  We were about to run past them, out of the room, when more footsteps came. Another man rounded in from the hallway. He had a gun and looked about to use it, but Bronwyn lunged at him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and, as his gun went off, flung him toward the back wall. He crashed right through it, pulverized concrete dust mixing in the air with a pink puff of blood. There was just enough time for Noor to turn from the hole to Bronwyn, her mouth forming a perfect O, before we all came to our senses and climbed through it.

  On the other side of the hole in the wall, beyond the man’s crumpled body, was a room flooded with daylight, and beyond that a stairway. We barreled down it, Bronwyn carrying Lilly over her shoulder, rounding corners at a dizzying pace until we’d descended six stories to the ground floor. We ran outside then through a hole in the fence into some back alley, then through the parking lot of a warehouse and into another alley, not even looking behind us, just listening for the helicopter, which faded a little more and then a little more still, until we were forced to stop and catch our breath.

  “I think—I think you might have killed that guy,” Noor said to Bronwyn, her eyes wide.

  “He had a gun,” Bronwyn said, and set Lilly down on her feet. “If you point a gun at my friends, I get to kill you. That’s—” She wiped her glistening forehead and let out a sighing breath. “That’s the rule.”

  “Good rule,” said Noor. She turned to me. “Sorry for what I said. About you maybe being one of them.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “If I were you, I might not have believed us either.”

  Noor went to Lilly and took her hand. “You all right, Lil?”

  “Little shaken up,” said Lilly. “I’ll live.”

  “We have to get far away f
rom here, and quickly,” Emma said. “What’s the fastest way?”

  “The train,” said Noor. “Station’s a block away.”

  “What about the car?” said Enoch.

  “They know the car by now,” I said. “We’ll have to come back for it later.”

  “If we live that long,” said Millard.

  * * *

  • • •

  Minutes later we were riding a cramped subway car toward Manhattan. Was that the right way to go? We had jumped onto the first train that came, just to get away from the people hunting us. While my friends talked in hushed voices about who those people might have been—wights? Some hostile peculiar clan we knew nothing about?—I stood up and looked at the map on the wall of the subway car, routes branching out everywhere. We were supposed to take Noor to that island in the middle of a river—10044. Blackwell’s Island, it had said on the postcard. I asked Noor and Lilly if they knew where it was. Neither had heard of it. I had no phone reception to do a map search. And once we found the island, how would we find the loop? Loop entrances were rarely obvious.

  But the more I thought about it, the less certain I felt about the plan. It was the mission we’d been given, but H’s sudden order to abort had thrown everything into doubt. What circumstances had changed? What had he been calling to warn me about, exactly? Was it the people who were hunting us that he’d been worried about, or was loop 10044 no longer safe?