A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(104)

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.”