Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(93)

Bronwyn and Olive’s boat, I realized with numb horror.

“Oh, my God,” Emma said.

“We have to get closer!” Hugh shouted, and for a moment we forgot our exhaustion and grabbed the oars to paddle toward it.

We called their names into the wind. We rowed through a tide of clothes ejected from split-open suitcases, every swirling dress and shirt we passed looking like a drowning child. I was soaked and shivering but hardly knew it.

We met Millard’s boat at the overturned hull of Bronwyn’s and searched the water with panic.

“Where are they?” Horace said. “Oh, if we’ve lost them . . .”

“Underneath!” Emma said, pointing at the hull. “Maybe they’re trapped underneath it!”

I wrested one of my oars from its lock and banged it against the overturned hull. “It’s safe now!” I shouted. “Swim out, we’ll rescue you!”

At first there was no response, and for a terrible moment I gave up all hope of finding them. But then came a knock in reply and then a fist smashed through and clawed at the air, making us all jump back in surprise.

“It’s Bronwyn!” Emma cried. “They’re alive!”

With a few more powerful strikes, Bronwyn knocked a starshaped hole in the hull and pulled herself out. She was panicked, hysterical, shouting with breath she didn’t have to spare. Shouting for Olive, who hadn’t been under the hull with her. She was still missing.

I stuck out my oar and Bronwyn grabbed it. Emma and I pulled her through the churning water to our boat just as hers sank and vanished beneath the waves.

“Olive—got to get Olive,” Bronwyn sputtered once she’d tumbled into the boat. She was shivering, coughing up seawater. She stood up in the pitching boat and pointed into the rain. “There!” she cried. “See it?”

I shielded my eyes from the stinging rain and looked, but all I could see were waves and fog.

“I don’t see anything!”

“She’s there!” Bronwyn insisted. “The rope!”

Then I saw what she was pointing at: not a flailing girl in the water but a fat thread of woven hemp trailing up from it, barely visible in all the chaos. A strand of taut brown rope extended up from the water and disappeared into the fog. Olive must’ve been attached to the other end, unseen.

We paddled to the rope and Bronwyn reeled it down, and after a minute Olive appeared from the clouds of fog above our heads, one end of the rope knotted around her waist. Her shoes had fallen off when her boat flipped, but luckily Bronwyn had the foresight to tie Olive to the anchor line, the other end of which was resting on the seafloor below us. If not for that, she surely would’ve been lost in the clouds, unrecoverable.

Olive threw her arms around Bronwyn’s neck and crowed, “You saved me, you saved me!”

They embraced, and watching them put a lump in my throat.

“We ain’t out of danger yet,” said Bronwyn. “We still got to reach shore before nightfall, else our troubles have only just begun.”

*

The storm had weakened some and the sea’s violent chop died down, but the idea of rowing another stroke, even in a perfectly calm sea, was unimaginable to me now. We hadn’t made it even halfway to the mainland and already I was hopelessly exhausted. My hands throbbed. My arms felt as heavy as tree trunks. Not only that, but the endless diagonal rocking was having an unpleasant effect on my stomach—and judging from the color of the faces around me, I wasn’t the only one.

“We’ll rest awhile,” Emma said, trying to sound encouraging. “We’ll rest and bail out the boats until the fog clears—”

“Fog like this has a mind of its own,” said Enoch from the next boat. “It can go days without breaking. It’ll be dark in a few hours, and then we’ll have to hope we can last until morning without the wights finding us out here. We’ll be utterly defenseless.”

“And without water,” said Hugh.

“Or food,” added Millard.

Olive raised both hands in the air and said, “I know where it is!”

Everyone turned to look at her. “Where what is?” said Emma.

“Land. I saw it when I was up at the end of that rope.” Olive had gotten above the fog, she explained, and briefly caught a clear view of the mainland.

“Fat lot of good that does,” grumbled Enoch. “We’ve circled back on ourselves a half dozen times since you were dangling up there.”

“Then reel me up again.”

“Are you certain?” Emma asked her. “It’s dangerous. What if a wind catches you or the rope snaps?”

Olive’s face went steely. “Reel me up,” she said again.

“When she gets like this, there’s no arguing,” said Emma. “Fetch the rope, Bronwyn.”

“You’re the bravest little girl I ever knew,” Bronwyn said, then set to work. She pulled the anchor out of the water and up into our boat, and with the extra length we lashed the two boats together so they couldn’t be separated again. Then we reeled Olive back up through the fog.

There was an odd quiet moment where we were all staring at a rope in the clouds, heads thrown back — waiting for a sign from heaven.

Enoch broke the silence. “Well?” he called, impatient.