When Lilly emerged from the restroom after a few minutes, Millard ran to offer her his arm. She took it—subtly, so it wouldn’t look strange to the other patrons—and when they’d made it back to the table, she said, “Okay. She’s agreed to meet you.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Where?”
“I’ll have to show you the way. Where she is, I’m the only one who can reach her.”
I couldn’t imagine what she meant, but I was intrigued nonetheless. We followed Lilly out a back door into an alley behind the café. As stealthily as I could, I walked around front to our parked car—there were no black SUVs in sight—then drove to the alley to pick everyone up. They piled in. Millard insisted Lilly ride up front. She gave us an address that wasn’t far away.
As we drove, the character of the neighborhood changed. The houses got older, uglier, then disappeared altogether, replaced by warehouses and industrial buildings, old and rusted. I noticed in my mirror that a certain gray sedan had been following us for a while. I took a sudden right turn, then three more in quick succession. After that, it was gone.
The address Lilly had given us led to a row of brick warehouses. At the end of the block was a building, five or six stories tall, that was still under construction. The bottom story was ringed by chain-link fences, the top half windowless and skeletal. I drove past it and parked down a side street.
Before we left the car, I grabbed my duffel bag and tossed in a few essentials. A flashlight. Abe’s operations log—heavy, but I was paranoid about leaving it. And a certain pear-shaped fast-food combo item from the glove box. (One never knew when such a thing could come in handy on a mission.) I slung the duffel crosswise over my back, shut the trunk, and turned to face the group.
“Ready.”
“How do we get in?” Emma said.
“There’s a hidden entrance,” Lilly said. “Follow me.”
And then we were off, actually struggling to keep up with Lilly at times as she strode down the street, tapping her cane before her.
“You really seem to know where you’re going,” Millard said.
“Yeah,” Lilly replied. “We’ve hung out here a few times, Noor and me. When we need to get away from people?”
“Like who?” I said.
“You know. Parents. Noor’s foster parents, especially.” She muttered something about them under her breath that I didn’t quite catch, and then she turned and tap-walked down an alley that ran between a warehouse and the under-construction building. Halfway down the alley she slowed and started feeling along the wooden fence with her hand. When she reached a particular board, she stopped.
“Here.” She pushed the board and it tipped upward, revealing an entrance to the site. “After you.”
“You guys hang out here?” said Bronwyn.
“It’s pretty safe,” said Lilly. “Not even the bums know how to get in.”
The place looked like a project some shady developer had started a decade ago, then abandoned when the money had run out. It had been left in a state of unfinished decay, both old and new at once.
Lilly got out her phone, pushed a button, and said, “Coming up,” into it, which was translated into a text message and sent.
A moment later the reply came, which her phone read out for us all to hear in an automated voice.
“Stop at the atrium and wait. I want to get a look at them.”
It was Noor. Our peculiar. We were close now.
We were following Lilly through the scaffolding when my phone began buzzing in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked.
Unknown number. Normally I would’ve ignored it, but something told me not to.
“Just a minute,” I said to the group.
I turned back, ducked out into the construction yard, and answered it.
“It’s H.”
My whole body tensed.
“Where have you been? I thought we were going to see you after Portal.”
“No time to explain. Look, I need you to abort the mission.”
I thought I’d misheard. “You what?”
“Abort. Cancel. You heard me.”
“Why? Everything’s going according to—”
“Circumstances have changed. It’s not important that you know the details. Just go home, now. All of you.”
I could feel my temper starting to rise. After all we’d done. I couldn’t believe it.
“Was it something we did? Did we screw something up?”
“No, no. Look, son, it’s getting too dangerous. Just do what I say. Abort. Go home.”
I was gripping the phone so tight my hand was starting to shake. We’d come too far to quit now.
“You’re breaking up,” I said. “I can’t hear you.”
“I said GO HOME.”
“Sorry, Boss. Bad connection.”
“Who’s that?” I heard Emma say, and I turned to see her coming out to retrieve me.
I ended the call, then tucked the phone into the duffel bag on my back, where I wouldn’t feel it vibrating.
“Wrong number.”
We followed Lilly into the building through a doorway with no door, then down a hallway from which the copper wiring had been torn, long gashes striping the walls like black veins. Grit and plaster crunched beneath our feet. Ripped insulation lay everywhere like puffs of pink cotton candy. When Lilly moved she put her feet in almost the exact spots where there were already prints, as if she’d memorized the route step by step. Every so often, I noticed, there was an object that didn’t belong—an old coffee can or a cardboard box turned upside down—that her cane would knock against, and I realized they had been put there as way markers, so she would know how much of the hall she’d walked down, and how much was left to go.
Turning a corner, we entered a stairwell.
“I can do this on my own, but it’s safer if you help me,” she said, and we all knew that you meant Millard.
He was more than happy to give her his arm. We climbed six flights of stairs, then were all a bit winded.
“Now it’s going to get a little weird,” Lilly warned.
We left the stairwell and walked into a hallway that was absolutely pitch-black. By which I mean there was no light at all, not even a minor glow from the stairwell. Rather than soft, gradual falloff of illumination, there was a hard line, like the light had hit some unseen barrier, and once we crossed it we could see the stairwell behind us but absolutely nothing in the other direction.
“Like the auditorium door,” I said, and I heard Emma say, “Mm-hmm.”
I took out my flashlight and shone it into the dark, but the beam was swallowed up. Emma lit a flame in her upturned hand. The glow petered out after only a few inches.
“Noor took the light,” Lilly explained. “So no one can find her but me.”
“Brilliant,” said Enoch.
“Link arms and form a human chain behind me,” said Lilly. “I’ll guide us.”
We followed her down the hall, slow and stumbling in the dark. Two times we passed rooms lit by windows, but the light from outside didn’t pass even an inch beyond the rooms’ doorways. It felt a bit like we were underwater, or in outer space. We made a few turns, and though I tried to make a mental map of our progress, I was soon confused, unsure I’d be able to get out again without Lilly’s help.
The sound of our footsteps changed. The hallway had ended at a large room.
“We’re here!” Lilly called out.
A searing beam of light shone down from above. We shielded our eyes, blinded now by light rather than dark.
“Let me see your faces!” a girl’s voice called down. “And tell me your names!”
I moved my hand away and blinked up into the light, then shouted my name. The others did the same.
“Who are you?” the girl called. “What do you want?”
“Can we talk face-to-face?” I said.
“Not yet,” came the echoing reply.
I wondered how often my grandfather had been in situations like this, and I wished I’d had a little of his vast experience to lean on. All that we’d been through came down to this. If this girl didn’t like what I said next, or if she didn’t believe me, all our efforts would have been for nothing.
“We traveled a long way to find you,” I said. “We came to tell you you’re not alone, that there are others like you. We’re like you.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me,” the girl called back.
“We know you’re not like most people,” Emma said.
“And there are people who are after you,” I said.
“And you’re scared,” said Bronwyn. “I was scared, too, when I first realized how different I was from most people.”
“Yeah?” said the girl. “Different how?”
We decided the best thing would be to show her. Since there wasn’t much I could do that was visibly peculiar, Emma lit a flame in her hands, Bronwyn lifted a heavy block of concrete above her head, and Millard picked up some random objects to demonstrate that he was there, but invisible.
“He’s the one I was telling you about,” Lilly said, and I could practically hear Millard beaming.
“So, can we talk?” I said.
“Wait there,” the girl said, and then the light she had made winked out.
We waited in the dark while the sound of her footsteps approached. I heard them above us, then coming down stairs, and then I saw her. I drew a sharp, involuntary breath. She was, quite literally, glowing. At first, she looked like a moving ball of light, but as she got closer, and my eyes adjusted, I could see she was a teenager—a tall Indian girl with sharp features, jet-black hair that framed her face, and wide-set eyes flashing with intensity. Every pore of her brown skin was emanating light. Even the hooded windbreaker and jeans she wore glowed slightly from the light that shone beneath.
She went to Lilly and hugged her, hard. The top of Lilly’s head only reached Noor’s cheek, and with Noor’s arms encircling her, it looked for a moment like Lilly was wrapped in light.
“Are you okay?” Lilly asked.
“Bored, mostly,” Noor said, and Lilly laughed a little and turned to introduce her friend.
“This is Noor.”
“Hi,” Noor said evenly, still assessing us.
“Noor, this is . . . uh, what do you call yourselves?”
Lilly happened to be looking at Emma.
“I’m Emma,” she said.
“I mean, what are you, again?” said Lilly.
Emma frowned. “Emma’s good enough for now, I think.”
“I’m Jacob,” I said. I stepped toward Noor and offered my hand, but she just looked at it. I lowered it, feeling awkward. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“Sure,” said Noor. “Let me show you to the grand salon.”
Taking Lilly’s arm, she turned and began to walk down a hall. She didn’t seem to mind having her back to us, so it seemed she’d decided we weren’t a threat. I noticed that the light emanating from her had gradually begun to dim, shrinking down into her core so that soon only her torso was glowing, and I caught glimpses of her shine only through her unzipped windbreaker and a rip in her jeans. She had been on guard when we first met but was starting to relax, and the light inside her corresponded somehow to her emotions.
We followed her from a large room with bare concrete walls into a smaller, windowless room with bare concrete walls. A couple of chairs and an old couch had been dragged in and draped with blankets, and there were some paperback books and comics and empty pizza boxes scattered around, evidence of long days and nights spent here. There were no lamps that I could see, but light shone from the room’s four corners, an apparently sourceless glow that was warm and yellow and breathed like firelight.
We sat. We talked. Actually, I did most of the talking—since it was only a few months ago that I was making these same life-altering discoveries myself—while Noor listened, watchful and guarded. I told her how I had grown up knowing nothing about my true nature. How my grandfather’s death had sparked this quest for truth that had led to me finding a time loop and meeting the peculiar children.
She put up a hand to stop me. “I was with you until time loop.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “I’m so used to this stuff now, I forget how bizarre it must sound.”
“It’s a day that repeats over and over again, every twenty-four hours,” Emma explained. “They have sheltered our kind from danger for centuries.”
“Normal people can’t enter them,” Millard said. “Nor could the monsters who used to hunt us.”
“What monsters?” Noor asked.
We explained, as best we could, what a hollowgast looked like, smelled like, sounded like. When we’d finished, Noor seemed puzzled.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Have you been attacked by one?”
“I’m trying to figure you out,” she said. “You talk like crazy people. Time loops. Monsters nobody can see. Shape-shifting.” She went to the couch, picked up a dog-eared comic book, and waved it in the air. “You talk like you’ve read too many of these. And I would one hundred percent have kicked your asses out of here already if not for Lilly, who really seems to like you, and that—well—”
“This.” Emma lit a ball of fire in her hand, then poured it from her right palm into her left, the flames dancing hypnotically.
“Yeah.” Noor dropped the comic book. “That.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the arm of the couch. “And it’s not monsters who’ve been chasing me. At least, I don’t think they are.”
“Why don’t you tell them about it?” said Lilly. “They want to help.”
“You know how many times I’ve heard that in my life? ‘They only want to help. Trust them. What could it hurt?’ Always the same lines.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out sharply. “But I guess, in this case, I’m out of options.”
“You’re hiding in an abandoned building,” Enoch said. “Relying on a blind girl to bring you food.”
Noor leveled a withering stare at him. “So what makes you peculiar, little man?”
“Oh, nothing too interesting,” Emma said quickly, stepping in front of Enoch.
“Excuse me?” Enoch peeked around her. “What, are you embarrassed?”
“Of course not,” Emma said, “I just thought it might be a little . . . soon.”
“If anything, it’s late,” Noor said. “It’s cards-on-the-table time. No secrets.”
Enoch shoved Emma aside. “You heard the lady. No secrets.”
“Fine,” Emma said. “Just don’t go overboard.”
Enoch stood and fished a plastic bag out of his pocket. It swung with the weight of something wet and dark. “Luckily, I saved a cat heart from the school.” He began to search around the room. “Has anyone got a doll or a stuffed animal? Or . . . a dead animal?”
Noor recoiled slightly, but seemed intrigued. “There’s a room full of mummified pigeons down the hall.”
She went out and showed him where it was. A minute later she came running back into the room, laughing and swatting at the air, and then a pigeon missing one wing and both its eyes flew into the room and fluttered around madly. The rest of us covered our heads and dove out of the way. The pigeon flung itself against the wall, dropped to the floor in a cloud of feathers, and stopped moving.
Enoch ran in. “I’ve never controlled a bird before! Wicked!”
“That was nuts,” Noor said, smiling while she caught her breath. “What the hell?!”
“What can I say?” said Enoch. “I’m extremely talented.”
“You’re a freak!” she said, laughing again. “But I think it’s cool. Really.”
Enoch beamed.
“Now you know everything,” said Emma, picking herself up from the floor.
“Your turn,” I said.
“Okay, okay.” Noor went to the couch and sat. “It’ll be a relief to tell you, actually. The only person who knows any of this is Lilly.”
We sat around her in a loose circle. The lights dimmed a bit. In a soft but unhesitating voice, Noor began to tell her story.
“The first time I noticed something weird was last spring.” She sighed, then looked around at us. “It’s so strange to be saying any of this out loud.”
“Take your time,” Emma said. “We’re not in a rush.”
Noor nodded appreciatively, and began again. “June second, a Tuesday, early afternoon. I had just gotten home from school, and Fartface—that’s my not-father—had been waiting around for me all day.”
The actual name she called her foster dad didn’t begin with Fart, but it did start with an F.
“We had a super-long talk about how I was wasting my time with clubs after school and instead I should get a crappy minimum-wage job at Ices Queen down the street. I told him my after-school things were for college applications and I didn’t need extra money, and anyway the state was paying him and Teena to take care of me. He didn’t like that. He started yelling. And I did what I always do when he yells, which is to run into the kids’ room, where my two not-siblings and I live, and which has a door with a lock. Greg and Amber weren’t home, so I was the only one in there, and Fartface wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept yelling through the door, and I was getting more and more upset, and I didn’t know what to do, and finally I opened my mouth to scream back at him, but instead of my voice coming out? All the lights in the room got brighter for a second—like much brighter—and then broke.”
“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 from 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?
What’s more, the subject of the mission was more than just the subject now. She was Noor, and she had a name and a story and a face (a very pretty one, at that); it was hard for me to imagine delivering her into the hands of strangers. Was I really supposed to dump her into some loop I knew nothing about, wash my hands of her, and head home?
I glanced over at her now, her scuffed Vans on the plastic bench seat and knees hugged to her chest, staring at the floor with a weariness the depth of which I could hardly fathom.
“Would you miss New York, if you had to leave?” I asked her.
It took five full seconds to draw herself out of whatever thought she’d been sunk in and look at me.
“Miss New York? Why?”
“Because I think you should come home with us, instead.”
Emma looked at me sharply, but it was Millard who objected aloud.
“That’s not the mission!”
“Forget the mission,” I said. “She’ll be safer with us than in any loop in this crazy city. Or on this side of the ocean.”
“We live in London, most of the time,” Emma explained. “In Devil’s Acre.”
Noor recoiled a bit.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Millard said. “Once you get past the smell, anyway.”
“We’re nearly finished with this mission from hell,” said Enoch. “Let’s not muck it up now. Let’s just take her where she’s supposed to go and be done with it already.”
“We don’t know who’s in this loop we’re going to,” I said, “or how capable they are. Or anything.”
“Is that any of our concern?” said Enoch.
“I agree with Jacob,” said Millard. “There are almost no ymbrynes left in America, and it’s an ymbryne’s job to protect and shape uncontacted peculiars. Who’s going to teach her how to be peculiar?”
Noor raised her hand. “Is anyone going to fill me in here?”
“An ymbryne—they’re like teachers,” I said. “And protectors.”
“And government leaders,” said Millard, and then he added, under his breath, “though unelected . . .”
“And overbearing know-it-alls who are always minding other people’s business,” said Enoch.
“Essentially, the backbone of our whole society,” said Emma.
“We don’t need an ymbryne,” I said, “we just need someplace safe. Anyway, Miss Peregrine probably wants to kill us right now.”
“She’ll get over it,” Enoch said.
“So, would you come with us?” I asked Noor.
She sighed, then chuckled. “What the hell. I could use a vacation.”
“Hey, what about me?” Lilly said.
“You’d be more than welcome to come,” Millard said, a bit too eagerly. “Though normal people cannot enter loops, I’m afraid.”
“I can’t leave anyway!” Lilly said. “School just started.” Then she laughed and said, “God, listen to me. As if none of this insanity even happened. That’s how badly school has messed up my brain.”
“Well, education is important,” said Millard.
“But I have parents. Pretty good ones, actually. And they would worry about me a lot.”
“I’ll be back,” said Noor. “But getting out of town until this stuff blows over sounds like an excellent idea.”
“So you trust us now?” I said.
She shrugged. “Enough.”
“How do you feel about road trips?”
Out of nowhere, Bronwyn slumped forward in her seat and crumpled to the floor.
“Bronwyn!” Emma cried, and leapt down next to her.
If any of the other people in the subway car had seen, they pretended they hadn’t.
“Is she okay?” Enoch said.
“I don’t know,” said Emma. She slapped Bronwyn’s cheek lightly and repeated her name until her eyes blinked open again.
“Fellows, I think—Rats, I should have mentioned this earlier.” Bronwyn winced. Raised the hem of her shirt. She was bleeding from her torso.
“Bronwyn!” said Emma. “My God!”
“The man with the gun . . . I think he shot me. Don’t worry, though. Not with a bullet.” Bronwyn opened her palm to show us a small dart, tipped now with her own blood.
“Why didn’t you say something?” I said.
“We needed to get out of there quickly. And I thought I was strong enough to overcome whatever he’d shot me with. But apparently . . .”
Her head lolled to the side and she passed out.