A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(121)

“Don’t leave,” I said, a sudden, shameful desperation coming over me.

“I really should. I’m sorry, Jacob.”

“It doesn’t have to be over. This is just a setback.”

“Stop. Please.” Her eyes were brimming with tears, and so, I realized, were mine. “It does. It does have to be over.”

“We’ll get H on the phone somehow, talk about what happened, what to do next—”

“Listen, Jacob. Please listen.” She pressed her palms together and touched the tips of her fingers to her lips—prayerful, pleading. “You’re not Abe,” she said. “You’re not Abe, and I’m afraid if you keep trying to be, it will kill you.” She turned away slowly, the doorway framing her, and walked out.



* * *



? ? ?

I lay in bed listening to noise from the street, thinking, dreaming, talking with Rafael when he came in to sprinkle me with strange dusts. I drifted in and out of an uneasy sleep. My emotions swung between anger and regret. Yes, I felt abandoned by my friends—could I even call them that anymore?—but part of me understood why they’d refused to take my side. They had risked a lot for me and nearly lost it all. I didn’t know if you could be excommunicated from peculiardom, but I imagine we’d all come close.

I was angry at Emma, too, for what she’d done, for what she’d said, for walking away. But I also wondered if the breakdown of our relationship had been my fault. Had I pushed her toward old feelings she’d purposely avoided for years? If I had never gone into Abe’s bunker, never called H, never involved Emma in any of this, would we still be together?

And Miss Peregrine. Miss P could be suffocating and frustrating and condescending, but she did have reason to be angry with me. So did my friends. The whole undertaking had been motivated to an uncomfortable degree by my own frustration with the ymbrynes and anger at my parents. The problem, really, was that I had been trying to navigate a world for which I had not been prepared. The peculiar universe was deeply complex, with rules and traditions and taxonomies and histories that even my friends, who had been studying it for nearly all of their long lives, had not yet wrapped their minds around. Newcomers should be required to train and study as hard as astronauts preparing for space. But when Miss Peregrine’s loop collapsed, I was thrown into it with no choice but to swim for my life. Miraculously, through some combination of dumb luck, peculiar talent, and the bravery of my friends, I had survived—emerged victorious, even.

But luck isn’t something you can depend upon, and my mistake was thinking I could dive in again and everything would work out somehow. In a fit of pique, and completely of my own accord, I had jumped back into that dark water, and had lashed several of my friends to me in the bargain, which was not only unwise, ultimately, but unkind. And I had very nearly died.

I was underprepared and overconfident. I couldn’t blame Miss Peregrine for that. So I couldn’t even be mad at her, really, or at my friends. The more I mulled it over, the more my anger homed in on someone else. A person who hadn’t even been present. A person who wasn’t even alive: my grandfather. He had known, my whole life, who I was. He had known, as a peculiar, what I would have to face one day. But he had not prepared me for it at all.

Why? Because I’d been rude to him in the fourth grade? Because I’d hurt his feelings? It was hard to believe he could’ve been so petty. Or was it, as Miss Peregrine had once suggested, because he was trying to spare me pain? Because he wanted me to grow up feeling normal?

It was a sweet idea, on its face. But not if I interrogated it a little bit. Because he knew. He had lived here, in this complicated and bloody and divided peculiar America. If he was really withholding the truth in order to spare me pain, he knew it was putting me at risk. Even if the hollows never got me, some gang of peculiar Americans would have sniffed me out eventually. Imagine my surprise, had I found out I was peculiar that way, as some heartless highwayman’s feral prize.

Abe left me without a map, without a key, without a clue. Without a single hint about how to navigate this strange new reality. It had been his duty to tell me, and he had not.

How could he have been so careless?

Because he didn’t care.

That nasty little voice in my head, back again.

I couldn’t believe he hadn’t cared. There had to be some other answer.

And then I realized there was someone still living who might know it.

“Rafael?”

The bone-mender stirred. He’d been sleeping in a chair by the window, the blue light of early morning washing over him.

“Yes, Master Portman?”

“I need to get out of this bed.”



* * *



? ? ?

Three hours later, I was up and moving again. I had a purple bruise under one eye and my ribs still ached, but otherwise Rafael had worked miracles and I was feeling pretty good. I made my way back toward Bentham’s Panloopticon as stealthily as I could, but there were people everywhere—the morning rush was in full swing—and I got stopped a few times for autographs. (It still surprised me every time I was recognized. I had spent so much of my life as an unremarkable nobody, that whenever I was approached my first thought was that they had confused me for someone else.)

I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave the Acre. I was risking being seen by someone who would report me to Miss Peregrine. But that wasn’t at the top of my list of concerns. I managed to make it through the front door, down the main hall, and upstairs to the Panloopticon hallways without being recognized. When the clerk at the Panloopticon entrance did, I told him I was going home and he waved me through. I ran down the hall, past busy travelers and officials at checkpoint desks and Sharon’s voice booming from an open door. I rounded a corner into the shorter hall, where my door was, found the broom closet marked A. PEREGRINE AND WARDS ONLY, and dove inside.