We were brought back to Devil’s Acre via a Manhattan loop entrance that connected to the Panloopticon—a route that would have saved my friends and me days of driving and untold trouble if only we’d known about it. I was spared an immediate tongue-lashing because I was injured. Instead, the ymbrynes brought me to a bone-mender named Rafael, who worked out of a tumbledown house on Little Stabbing Street. For the rest of the day and all that night, I lay in a room filled with apothecary bottles while he applied stinging powders and pungent poultices to my wounds. He was no Mother Dust, but I could feel myself beginning to heal.
I was confined to the bed, mostly sleepless, haunted by failures and doubts and guilt. (If only I had listened to H. If only I had aborted the mission when he’d begged me to.) Haunted by the things Leo had said about my grandfather. Not that I thought they could be true—of course he had been framed by wights, it’s the only explanation that made any sense—but the simple fact that anyone would fabricate such lies about him made me deeply uncomfortable. I would have to set that right, if I could ever get H to talk to me again. But I was haunted primarily by guilt about Noor. If she had never met me at all, she’d be safer than she was now. Hunted, yes, but at least she’d be free.
My friends came to see me in the morning. Emma, Millard, Bronwyn. And Enoch, too, who recounted how he had come out of Frankie’s odd trance to find himself dressed in doll’s clothes, which he took off as fast as he could before running away.
“We think he woke up when I tackled Frankie,” said Emma. “She let go of us all, and that must have broken her hold on Enoch, too.”
“She’s quite powerful, to be able to influence people remotely that way,” said Millard. “I’ll have to include her in my new book, Who’s Who in Peculiar America.”
“I can control people remotely, too,” said Enoch. “Provided they’re dead.”
“It’s too bad, you would have made a cute couple,” I said.
Enoch leaned over my bed and flicked a bruise on my arm, and I yelped.
They told me Miss Peregrine hadn’t talked to them yet—not even to reprimand them. She’d hardly said a word to any of us since we’d returned, other than to warn us not to leave the Acre.
“She’s still too angry,” said Emma. “I’ve never seen her like this.”
“Me, neither,” said Bronwyn. “Not even the time my brother sank the Cairnholm ferry with all of us aboard.”
“What if they excommunicate us from peculiardom?” said Emma.
“You can’t be excommunicated from peculiardom,” Enoch said. “Can you?”
“This whole thing was such an awful idea,” Bronwyn said miserably.
“We were doing fine until you got shot with that sleep dart, or whatever it was,” said Enoch.
“So it’s my fault?”
“We never would’ve gotten stuck in Frankie’s loop-trap if we hadn’t had to go looking for a hospital!”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” I said. “We just had some bad luck.”
“If it weren’t that, something else would’ve gotten us,” said Emma. “I’m amazed we made it as far as we did, considering the vastness of our ignorance. We were fools to think we could do a mission in America with so little preparation and training.” She glanced at me briefly, then looked away. “There was only one Abe Portman.”
It was a cheap shot, but it stung. With painful effort, I sat up in bed. “His partner thought we were prepared. He gave us the mission.”
“And I would very much like to know why,” came a voice from the doorway.
We turned to see Miss Peregrine, leaning against the jamb holding an unlit pipe. How long had she been there?
Everyone tensed, ready for a dressing-down. Miss Peregrine walked in, surveying the room and all its equipment. “I don’t suppose you children know how much trouble you’ve caused.” She stopped in the middle of the floor.
“You must have been very worried,” said Millard.
She turned her head sharply toward him and narrowed her eyes. It was clear we were not yet welcome to speak. “I was, yes, but not only about you people.” She spoke with uncharacteristic coldness. “We have been engaged for some months—even before the hollowgast menace subsided—in an effort to negotiate peace between the American clans. Your actions have thrown those efforts into dire jeopardy.”
“We didn’t know,” I said quietly. “You and Miss Cuckoo said the ymbrynes were busy with the reconstruction effort.”
“It was top-secret ymbryne business,” she said. “It would never have occurred to me that I would need to caution my own wards against striking out on their own into dangerous and poorly charted territory—not only without permission, but without even telling me—in order to conduct some ill-conceived rescue mission assigned to you by an unknown and utterly untrustworthy source . . .” Her tone rose shrilly, and then she paused, rubbing a knuckle into her eye. “Excuse me. I haven’t slept in days.”
She took a match from her dress pocket, lifted her foot and struck it deftly against the sole, and lit her pipe. When she’d taken a few meditative puffs, she continued.
“The other ymbrynes and I worked around the clock to negotiate your release from Leo Burnham’s Five Boroughs clan. It’s quite a complex thing when the very people who are trying to broker a peace treaty are accused of committing high crimes.” Miss Peregrine let that sink in for a moment before she went on. “America is badly divided. Here’s the gist of it, which I share now only because I want to impress upon you how difficult you’ve made things. There are three major factions: the Five Boroughs clan, whose influence extends through much of the East Coast; the Invisible Hand, with power concentrated in Detroit; and the Californios in the West, with Los Angeles as its capital. Texas and the South are autonomous, semi-lawless zones, which have resisted efforts to centralize control in any one loop, an unfortunate situation that has only worsened societal rifts. But tensions among the big three are the primary concern. They have long-standing boundary disputes, old grudges, and the like, but for a hundred years the threat of hollowgast attacks seriously reduced their mobility and prevented occasional skirmishes from escalating into war. Now that the hollows are mostly gone, however, the skirmishes are worsening.”
“In other words, we couldn’t have picked a worse time to go blundering in,” said Millard.
“You could not have,” Miss Peregrine agreed. “Especially given the delicate work we ymbrynes have taken on.”
I had heard some of this before, but my friends had not. They looked deflated and horrified.
“I get why the situation is delicate,” I said. “I just don’t understand why trying to help one peculiar in need was such a terrible thing.”
“It wouldn’t have been, in Europe,” said Miss Peregrine. “But in America it’s a serious offense.”
“But my grandfather spent his whole career finding and helping uncontacted peculiars.”
“Years ago!” she said, nearly shouting. “Conventions change, Mr. Portman! Laws are rewritten! And if you had simply asked me, or any ymbryne, we would have told you that the Americans are territorial, and what was an act of heroism twenty-five years ago is now considered a capital offense.”
“But why?”
“Because the most valuable resource in peculiardom is us. Peculiars. If two loops are in conflict with each other, they need as many peculiars in their ranks as they can find—to be fighters, bone-menders, runners, invisible spies, and so on. An army. But we peculiars have a very limited population from which to recruit. And thanks to the evil hunger of the hollows, new peculiars were hard to find for a very long time. They got snapped up—quite literally. Starved of new blood, peculiar populations grew older and became loop-bound. An army that can’t stray far from its loop for fear of aging forward isn’t very effective. So there is really nothing more valuable in peculiardom than a never-contacted peculiar. Especially a powerfully talented one.”
“Why didn’t H tell us that?” I said. “He must’ve known helping Noor would make the local clans angry.”
“I’d like to ask him that same question,” Miss Peregrine said angrily. “And several more, as well.”
“I’m sure his motives were virtuous,” said Millard. “She was being hunted by some very nasty people.”
“Helping her might’ve been virtuous,” said Miss Peregrine. “Involving my wards in the matter was not.”
“We’re so sorry,” said Emma. “I hope you can believe that.”
Miss Peregrine ignored her, as she had ignored all our attempts to apologize. She went to the window and blew a cloud of pipe-smoke out toward the humming street. “We were making progress in our peace talks, but this episode has seriously damaged the clans’ trust in us. The neutral party cannot be suspected of having any agenda other than peace. It’s a bad setback.”
“Do you think they’ll go to war?” asked Millard. “Because of us?”
“We may yet have an opportunity to mend things. But the clans are quite far apart on a number of key issues. They must agree on territorial boundaries, elect a peacekeeping council . . . these are no small matters, and the stakes are considerable. If war should break out between them, it would be a disaster not only for American peculiars, but for all of us. War is a germ that can rarely be contained. It would surely spread.”
Judging from our slumped shoulders and downcast expressions, all of us were feeling intense shame. I was starting to regret everything—even reaching out to H in the first place.
After what felt like a long time, Miss Peregrine turned to look at us. “Worse than any of that,” she said, sighing, “worse than the clans not trusting us, is that I feel I can no longer trust you.”
“Don’t say that, miss, don’t say that,” pleaded Bronwyn.
“I think I’m perhaps most disappointed in you, Miss Bruntley. This sort of behavior isn’t so surprising from Miss Bloom or Mr. O’Connor. But you have always been so loyal and kind.”
“I’ll make it up to you,” Bronwyn said. “I promise.”
“You’ll start by working on the kitchen cleanup crew here in the Acre for one month.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Bronwyn, nodding eagerly. She seemed relieved to have a punishment, which meant forgiveness was possible.
“Miss Bloom, I’m reassigning you to the Smoking Street garbage incinerator.” I saw Emma wince, but she said nothing. “Mr. O’Connor, you’ll be sweeping chimneys. Mr. Nullings—”
“Miss Peregrine?” I interrupted her.
She stopped mid-sentence. My friends looked at me with various shades of disbelief.
“What is it?” said Miss Peregrine.
I knew that what I was about to ask would be met with a barrage of resistance. But I had to say it anyway.
“What about Noor?”
“What about her?” said Miss Peregrine. I knew her patience was wearing thin. But I couldn’t let this go.
“We just . . . left her there,” I said.
“I’m aware of what happened,” Miss Peregrine said. “And if it had been possible to bring her back to the Acre with us, I would have done it. But it took all the leverage I had to secure your release. To then insist upon taking her, too, would have made it seem as if it were her we’d wanted all along. That we really were after their uncontacted peculiars. And that would have derailed the peace talks.”
Miss Peregrine had a point, but she was talking about politics, and I was talking about a person. Couldn’t we avoid war and save Noor? And so I persisted.
“Leo’s crazy and dangerous,” I said. “I know it would look bad, so maybe there’s a way we can sneak her out, so they wouldn’t know it was us . . .”
Emma was shooting me daggers with her eyes. Stop, she mouthed.
Miss Peregrine was about to lose it, I could tell.
“Mr. Portman,” she said, “if that girl’s in danger, it’s your fault. I cannot believe, after all I just told you, that you’re still insisting we attempt to remove her from that loop. I simply can’t believe it.”
“I know it’s my fault, and I admit that.” I was talking fast, trying to make my point without pushing Miss Peregrine too far. “But you should’ve seen the people who were after her; they had helicopters and, like, special-ops tactical gear.”
“Obviously, that was one of the other clans.”
“It wasn’t, though,” I said, talking over her now, “Leo’s guys didn’t know who they were—”
“Mr. Portman.”
“There’s something special about her, something important, I have this feeling—
“Mr. Portman!”
“Jacob, desist,” Millard hissed at me.
“I just don’t think H would’ve sent us after her if she weren’t important, you know? He’s not an idiot.”
“Mr. Portman, she is none of your concern!” Miss Peregrine yelled.
I had never heard her shout like that. The room went quiet. Even the street noise coming through the window seemed to hush.
She was trembling with anger.
“Sometimes imperfect situations must be tolerated in order to achieve a greater good,” she said, struggling to control her tone. “The safety of one cannot outweigh the safety of thousands.”
I was angry, too. Which is why I couldn’t come up with anything more articulate to say than “Well, that sucks.”
Bronwyn gasped. No one spoke to Miss Peregrine that way.
Miss Peregrine took a step forward. Leaned over me in my bed. “Yes, Mr. Portman, it sucks. But deciding between choices that suck is precisely why being a leader can suck. Which is precisely the reason we don’t, and will never, involve children in high-level leadership decisions.” She said the word children so pointedly, it felt like she was throwing it in our faces.
I saw Emma’s brow furrow. “Miss Peregrine?” she said.
Miss Peregrine turned sharply to face her, as if daring her to speak. “What is it, Miss Bloom?”
“We aren’t children anymore.”
“Yes,” she said, “you are. You have proven that today.” And she turned on her heel and stalked out of the room.
Miss Peregrine left a stunned silence in her wake. When the sound of her footfalls leaving the house had faded, my friends found their voices.
“You’re such an ass, Portman,” said Enoch. “You made her even madder. Rambling on about that girl!”
“If one of you were still in that loop, we’d all be worried,” I said. “Why shouldn’t we worry about her?”
“It’s none of our concern,” Bronwyn mumbled. “Like Miss P said.”
“They’re not going to kill her or anything,” said Enoch. “She’s got to be safer with Leo’s people than she was hiding from helicopters in some abandoned building.”
“We don’t know that!” I said. “The mission was to get her to a safe loop, not just drop her off wherever—”
“Forget the bloody mission!” Emma exploded. “There is no mission anymore! Mission over! Mission stupid to begin with!”
“Agreed, agreed, agreed,” said Bronwyn. “We should just forget it ever happened and hope the ymbyrnes forgive us.”
“It was partly their fault!” I said. “None of this would have happened if they had just told us what was going on. I didn’t know they were forging some peace accord . . .”
“Don’t try and pin this on the ymbrynes,” Bronwyn said.
“They treat us like idiots!” I said. “You all said it yourselves!”
“I don’t know about you,” said Bronwyn, “but after seeing how the Americans live, I’m glad we have ymbrynes, and I’m never going to complain about them again. So if that’s what we’re doing right now, please count me out.”
“I’m not complaining, I’m just saying—”
“We’re not their equals, Jacob. And you aren’t, either. I mean, it’s really great what you did for everybody in the Library of Souls, but just because you’re a famous hero and people want your autograph doesn’t mean you’re as important as an ymbryne.”
“I never said I was.”
“Well, you’re acting like you are. So if Miss Peregrine wants to keep a secret from you, I’m sure there’s a good reason, and that’s the end of it.”
Bronwyn turned and went out, leaving another silence behind her.
“What about the rest of you?”I said.
“What about us, what?” Emma said sourly.
“What happened to being independent? Making our own decisions? Is that all out the window now that Miss P is pissed at us?”
“Don’t be purposely thick,” said Enoch. “We could have started a war.”
“Miss Peregrine has every right to be furious with us,” said Emma.
“I agree that we are often treated like children,” said Millard. “But we picked a bad time to assert our independence.”
“We couldn’t have known that,” I said. “But just because we made one mistake doesn’t mean we should give up completely.”
“Yes, it does,” said Enoch. “In this case, it does. I’m going to put my head down, sweep some chimneys, and hope things go back to normal soon.”
“What a heroic sentiment,” I said.
Enoch laughed, but I could tell I’d hurt him. He came up to my bed, pulled some wilted daisies from his pocket, and tossed them onto my blanket. “You’re no hero, either,” he said. “You’re not Abe Portman and you’re never going to be. So why don’t you just stop trying.” And he walked out.
I felt frozen. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’d better be going, too,” Millard mumbled. “I don’t want the headmistress to think we’re . . .”
I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said.
“What? Conspiring?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“What about the others? Are they coming to see me?” I hadn’t seen Horace, Hugh, Olive, or Claire since we’d left on the mission, which felt like a lifetime ago.
“I don’t think so,” said Millard. “See you later, Jacob.”
I didn’t like how this was ending. I could feel a line being drawn, with me on one side, and everyone else on the other.
Millard left, his coat and pants floating out the door. And now I was alone with Emma—and she was moving toward the exit, too.
“Don’t leave,” I said, a sudden, shameful desperation coming over me.
“I really should. I’m sorry, Jacob.”
“It doesn’t have to be over. This is just a setback.”
“Stop. Please.” Her eyes were brimming with tears, and so, I realized, were mine. “It does. It does have to be over.”
“We’ll get H on the phone somehow, talk about what happened, what to do next—”
“Listen, Jacob. Please listen.” She pressed her palms together and touched the tips of her fingers to her lips—prayerful, pleading. “You’re not Abe,” she said. “You’re not Abe, and I’m afraid if you keep trying to be, it will kill you.” She turned away slowly, the doorway framing her, and walked out.
I lay in bed listening to noise from the street, thinking, dreaming, talking with Rafael when he came in to sprinkle me with strange dusts. I drifted in and out of an uneasy sleep. My emotions swung between anger and regret. Yes, I felt abandoned by my friends—could I even call them that anymore?—but part of me understood why they’d refused to take my side. They had risked a lot for me and nearly lost it all. I didn’t know if you could be excommunicated from peculiardom, but I imagine we’d all come close.
I was angry at Emma, too, for what she’d done, for what she’d said, for walking away. But I also wondered if the breakdown of our relationship had been my fault. Had I pushed her toward old feelings she’d purposely avoided for years? If I had never gone into Abe’s bunker, never called H, never involved Emma in any of this, would we still be together?
And Miss Peregrine. Miss P could be suffocating and frustrating and condescending, but she did have reason to be angry with me. So did my friends. The whole undertaking had been motivated to an uncomfortable degree by my own frustration with the ymbrynes and anger at my parents. The problem, really, was that I had been trying to navigate a world for which I had not been prepared. The peculiar universe was deeply complex, with rules and traditions and taxonomies and histories that even my friends, who had been studying it for nearly all of their long lives, had not yet wrapped their minds around. Newcomers should be required to train and study as hard as astronauts preparing for space. But when Miss Peregrine’s loop collapsed, I was thrown into it with no choice but to swim for my life. Miraculously, through some combination of dumb luck, peculiar talent, and the bravery of my friends, I had survived—emerged victorious, even.
But luck isn’t something you can depend upon, and my mistake was thinking I could dive in again and everything would work out somehow. In a fit of pique, and completely of my own accord, I had jumped back into that dark water, and had lashed several of my friends to me in the bargain, which was not only unwise, ultimately, but unkind. And I had very nearly died.
I was underprepared and overconfident. I couldn’t blame Miss Peregrine for that. So I couldn’t even be mad at her, really, or at my friends. The more I mulled it over, the more my anger homed in on someone else. A person who hadn’t even been present. A person who wasn’t even alive: my grandfather. He had known, my whole life, who I was. He had known, as a peculiar, what I would have to face one day. But he had not prepared me for it at all.
Why? Because I’d been rude to him in the fourth grade? Because I’d hurt his feelings? It was hard to believe he could’ve been so petty. Or was it, as Miss Peregrine had once suggested, because he was trying to spare me pain? Because he wanted me to grow up feeling normal?
It was a sweet idea, on its face. But not if I interrogated it a little bit. Because he knew. He had lived here, in this complicated and bloody and divided peculiar America. If he was really withholding the truth in order to spare me pain, he knew it was putting me at risk. Even if the hollows never got me, some gang of peculiar Americans would have sniffed me out eventually. Imagine my surprise, had I found out I was peculiar that way, as some heartless highwayman’s feral prize.
Abe left me without a map, without a key, without a clue. Without a single hint about how to navigate this strange new reality. It had been his duty to tell me, and he had not.
How could he have been so careless?
Because he didn’t care.
That nasty little voice in my head, back again.
I couldn’t believe he hadn’t cared. There had to be some other answer.
And then I realized there was someone still living who might know it.
“Rafael?”
The bone-mender stirred. He’d been sleeping in a chair by the window, the blue light of early morning washing over him.
“Yes, Master Portman?”
“I need to get out of this bed.”
Three hours later, I was up and moving again. I had a purple bruise under one eye and my ribs still ached, but otherwise Rafael had worked miracles and I was feeling pretty good. I made my way back toward Bentham’s Panloopticon as stealthily as I could, but there were people everywhere—the morning rush was in full swing—and I got stopped a few times for autographs. (It still surprised me every time I was recognized. I had spent so much of my life as an unremarkable nobody, that whenever I was approached my first thought was that they had confused me for someone else.)
I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave the Acre. I was risking being seen by someone who would report me to Miss Peregrine. But that wasn’t at the top of my list of concerns. I managed to make it through the front door, down the main hall, and upstairs to the Panloopticon hallways without being recognized. When the clerk at the Panloopticon entrance did, I told him I was going home and he waved me through. I ran down the hall, past busy travelers and officials at checkpoint desks and Sharon’s voice booming from an open door. I rounded a corner into the shorter hall, where my door was, found the broom closet marked A. PEREGRINE AND WARDS ONLY, and dove inside.
I walked out of the potting shed into the slanting sun and muggy heat of a Florida afternoon.
My friends were in Devil’s Acre. My parents were traveling in Asia.
The house was empty.
I went inside, settled onto a sofa in the living room, and took my phone out of my pocket. It still had a little battery left. I dialed H’s number. After three rings, a man answered.
“Hong’s.”
“I’m calling for H,” I said.
“Hold on.”
In the background I could hear voices, the noise of clattering plates. Then H came on the line.
“Hello?” he said warily.
“It’s Jacob.”
“I figured the ymbrynes would have had you under lock and key by now.”
“Not quite,” I said, “but they’re pretty angry. I’m sure they wouldn’t be happy if they knew I was calling you, either.”
He chuckled. “I’m sure they wouldn’t.” I knew he was angry with me, too. I could hear it in his voice. But he seemed to have forgiven me already, probably even before we’d talked. “Hey, I’m glad you’re all right. You had me worried.”
“Yeah. I had me worried, too.”
“Why the hell didn’t you listen to me? Now things are all fouled up.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Let me help fix it.”
“No, thank you. You’ve done quite enough.”
“I should’ve aborted the mission when you told me to,” I said. “But—” I hesitated, worried this would sound like an accusation. “Why didn’t you tell me we were doing something illegal?”
“Illegal? Where’d you get that?”
“It’s the clans’ law. You can’t take an uncontacted peculiar—”
“We should all be free to go where we like,” he interrupted. “Any law that takes your freedom away should be ignored.”
“Well, I agree. But the ymbrynes are trying to negotiate a peace treaty between the clans, and—”
“You think I don’t know that?” he said, getting frustrated. “The clans will go to war if that’s what they want to do, and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking it’s got anything to do with you or me. Anyway, there’s bigger things at stake than whether the damned clans want to fight with one another.”
“Really? Like what?”
“Like the girl.”
“You mean Noor.”
“Of course I mean her. And don’t say her name out loud again.”
“Why is she so important?”
“I’m not going to tell you over an unsecured telephone line. And, anyhow, you don’t need to know. Truth is, I should never have gotten you involved in the first place. I went against my better judgment. I broke a promise, too, and I’m sick about it. You nearly got killed because of it.”
“What promise? To who?”
There was a pause. I might’ve thought the line had gone dead, but I could hear dishes rattling in the background. Finally, he said, “To your grandfather.”
Which reminded me of the reason I’d called H in the first place.
“Why?” I said. “Why did he never tell me anything? Why would he ask you to keep secrets from me?”
“Because he wanted to protect you, son.”
“That was never going to be possible. All it did was leave me totally unprepared.”
“He always meant to tell you who you were. But he died too soon to do it himself.”
“Then what was he protecting me from?”
“From our work. He didn’t want you involved.”
“Then why did he send me postcards from your missions? Or make maps for me? Or make my nickname the passcode to the bunker under his house?”
I heard H take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He was leaving you tools in case of emergency. But that’s it. Now, I’m afraid you caught me on my way out.”
“To do what?”
“One last job,” he replied. “Then I’m retired for good.”
“You’re going to try to get her back, aren’t you?”
“That’s no business of yours.”
“Wait for me. I’ll come to you. I want to help. Please.”
“No, thank you. Like I said, you’ve done quite enough—and you don’t take orders.”
“I will. I promise.”
“Okay, then take this order. Go back to your life. Go back to your ymbrynes and your safe little world, because you aren’t ready for this one yet. Maybe we’ll meet again, someday, when you are.”
And then he hung up.