A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(118)
“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.”