Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(82)

I hardly felt the cold. All I could think about was reaching the cage before it disappeared beneath the waves. We tore at the water and sputtered and choked as black swells slapped our faces. It was difficult to tell how far away the beacon was, just a single point of light in a surging ocean of dark. It bobbed and fell and came and went, and twice we lost sight of it and had to stop, searching frantically before spotting it again.

The strong current was carrying the cage out to sea, and us with it. If we didn’t reach it soon, our muscles would fail and we’d drown. I kept this morbid thought to myself for as long as I could, but when the beacon disappeared a third time and we looked for it so long we couldn’t even be sure what section of the rolling black sea it had disappeared from, I shouted, “We have to go back!”

Emma wouldn’t listen. She swam ahead of me, farther out to sea. I grasped at her scissoring feet but she kicked me off.

“It’s gone! We aren’t going to find them!”

“Shut up, shut up!” she cried, and I could tell from her labored breaths that she was as exhausted as I was. “Just shut up and look!”

I grabbed her and shouted in her face and she kicked at me, and when I wouldn’t let go and she couldn’t force me to, she began to cry, just wordless howls of despair.

I tried to drag her back toward the lighthouse, but she was like a stone in the water, pulling me down. “You have to swim!” I shouted. “Swim or we’ll drown!”

And then I saw it—the faintest blink of red light. It was close, just below the surface. At first I didn’t say anything, afraid I’d imagined it, but then it blinked a second time.

Emma whooped and shouted. It looked like the cage had landed on another wreck—how else could it have come to rest so shallowly?—and because it had only just sunk, I told myself it was possible the birds were still alive.

We swam and prepared to dive for the cage, though I didn’t know where the breath would come from, we had so little left. Then, strangely, the cage seemed to rise toward us.

“What’s happening?” I shouted. “Is that a wreck?”

“Can’t be. There are none over here!”

“Then what the hell is that?”

It looked like a whale about to surface, long and massive and gray, or some ghost ship rising from its grave, and there erupted a sudden and powerful swell that came up from below and pushed us away. We tried to paddle against it but had no more luck than flotsam caught in a tidal wave, and then it thudded against our feet and we were rising, too, riding its back.

It came out of the water beneath us, hissing and clanking like some giant mechanical monster. We were caught in a sudden rush of foaming surf that raced off it in every direction, thrown hard onto a surface of metal grates. We hooked our fingers through the grates to keep from being washed into the sea. I squinted through the salt spray and saw that the cage had come to rest between what looked like two fins jutting from the monster’s back, one smaller and one larger. And then the lighthouse beam swept past, and in its gleam I realized they weren’t fins at all but a conning tower and a giant bolted-down gun. This thing we were riding wasn’t a monster or a wreck or a whale—

“It’s a U-boat!” I shouted. That it had risen right beneath our feet was no coincidence. It had to be what Golan was waiting for.

Emma was already on her feet and sprinting across the rolling deck toward the cage. I scrambled to stand. As I began to run a wave flashed over the deck and knocked us both down.

I heard a shout and looked up to see a man in a gray uniform rise from a hatch in the conning tower and level a gun at us.

Bullets rained down, hammering the deck. The cage was too far away—we’d be torn to pieces before we could reach it—but I could see that Emma was about to try anyway.

I ran and tackled her and we tumbled sideways off the deck and into the water. The black sea closed above us. Bullets peppered the water, leaving trails of bubbles in their wake.

When we surfaced again, she grabbed me and screamed, “Why did you do that? I nearly had them!”

“He was about to kill you!” I said, wrestling away—and then it occurred to me that she hadn’t even seen him, she’d been so focused on the cage, so I pointed up at the deck, where the gunner was striding toward it. He picked the cage up and rattled it. Its door hung open, and I thought I saw movement inside—some reason for hope—and then the lighthouse beam washed over everything. I saw the gunner’s face full in the light, his mouth curled into a leering grin, his eyes depthless and blank. He was a wight.

He reached into the cage and pulled out a single sodden bird. From the conning tower, another soldier whistled to him, and he ran back toward the hatch with it.

The sub began to rattle and hiss. The water around us churned as if boiling.

“Swim or it’ll suck us down with it!” I shouted to Emma. But she hadn’t heard me—her eyes were locked elsewhere, on a patch of dark water near the stern of the boat.

She swam for it. I tried to stop her but she fought me off. Then, over the whine of the sub, I heard it—a high, shrieking call. Miss Peregrine!

We found her bobbing in the waves, struggling to keep her head above water, one wing flapping, the other broken looking. Emma scooped her up. I screamed that we had to go.

We swam away with what little strength we had. Behind us, a whirlpool was opening up, all the water displaced by the sub rushing back to fill the void as it sank. The sea was consuming itself and trying to consume us, too, but we had with us now a screeching winged symbol of victory, or half a victory at least, and she gave us the strength to fight the unnatural current. Then we heard Bronwyn shouting our names, and our brawny friend came crashing through the waves to tow us back to safety.