A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(34)

“I won’t hear of it!” he said, then handed back the man’s ticket. “Look sharp, Weebus, I’m watching you.”

The man scurried off.

“This way, children. It isn’t far.”

He cleared a path for us through the crowded hall, then led us down a flight of stairs. On the ground floor we passed Bentham’s grand library, where the furniture had been cleared away to make room for a hundred or more cots.

“That’s where we used to sleep, until we came to live with you,” Emma said to me. “Ladies in that room, men in this one.”

We passed what had formerly been a dining room, now crowded with even more cots. The whole bottom floor of Bentham’s house had been turned into a shelter for displaced peculiars.

“Were you comfortable there?” I asked.

A dumb question.

Emma shrugged; she didn’t like to complain. “It’s certainly better than sleeping in a wightish prison,” she said.

“Not much better,” said Horace—who loved to complain and had sidled up to me the moment he sensed an opportunity. “Let me tell you, Jacob, it was awful. Not everyone takes their personal hygiene as seriously as we do. Some nights I had to plug my nose with camphor sticks! And there isn’t any privacy, nor any wardrobes nor dressing rooms nor proper washing-rooms, even, and not an ounce of creativity coming out of the kitchen”—we were passing it now, and through the door I could see a battalion of cooks chopping things and stirring pots—“and so many of these poor devils from other loops have nightmares that you can hardly sleep at night for all the moaning and screaming!”

“You’re one to talk,” said Emma. “You wake up screaming twice a week!”

“Yes, but at least my dreams mean something,” he said.

“You know, there’s a girl in America who can remove nightmares,” I heard Millard say. “Perhaps she could be of assistance.”

“There is no one in the world qualified to manipulate my dreams,” Horace said testily.

Emma’s letters to me had been so breezy and cheerful, always focused on the happy times and the little adventures they were having. She had never mentioned the living conditions here or their daily struggles, and I felt a surge of new respect for her resilience.

Sharon threw open the huge oaken door at the end of the hallway. Street noise and daylight flooded in.

“Stay together!” Miss Peregrine shouted, and then we were outside, plunging into the flow of bodies on the sidewalk.



* * *



? ? ?

If Emma hadn’t grabbed my hand and pulled me along, I might’ve stayed frozen where I stood. I hardly recognized the place. When I had last seen Devil’s Acre, Caul’s tower was a pile of still-smoking bricks, and wights were fleeing through the streets pursued by angry mobs. There were riots as addicts looted stashes of unguarded ambrosia and the wights’ collaborators burned buildings filled with evidence of their crimes. But that was a while ago, and it looked like the place had made great progress since then. It was still a hellhole at heart—the buildings were caked with grime and the sky was the same poisonous yellow it had always been—but the fires had been put out, the debris cleared away, and there were uniformed peculiars directing horse-and-buggy traffic in the crowded street.

More than the place, though, it was the people who had changed. Gone were the prowling, hollow-eyed addicts, the dealers in peculiar flesh displaying their wares in shop windows, the ambrosia-enhanced gladiators with light beaming from their eyes. Judging from their eclectic and era-spanning costumes, these peculiars hailed from loops across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East—and from many different time periods, as well.

In their hunt for peculiar souls the wights had not discriminated, and their reach had extended much farther than I had realized.

What struck me more than their costumes was the dignity with which they carried themselves, in spite of their circumstances. They had come seeking refuge from damaged and destroyed loops. They had lost their homes, seen friends and loved ones killed before their eyes, suffered unimaginable traumas. But there were no shocked and vacant stares. No one dressed in rags. Each one of them had had a giant hole blown through their lives, but the street pulsed with determined energy.

Perhaps they simply did not have time to mourn. But I preferred to believe that, for the first time in nearly a century, peculiars could do more than just hide in their loops and hope. The worst had come to pass. Having survived it, there was much to do: They had a world to remake. And they could make it better.

For a block or two, I was so absorbed in staring at all of them that I didn’t notice how many of them were staring back. But then someone did a double take, and someone else pointed at me, and I could have sworn I saw my name form on their lips.

They knew who I was.

We passed a young boy hawking newspapers, and he was shouting: “Jacob Portman to visit the Acre today! Hero returns to Devil’s Acre for first time since his victory over the wights!”

I felt my face go hot.

“Why does Jacob get all the credit?” I heard Enoch say. “We were there, too!”

“Jacob! Jacob Portman!” Two teenage girls were following me, waving a piece of paper. “Would you sign this for us?”

“He’s late for an important meeting!” Emma said, pulling me on through the crowd.