A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(103)

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.