A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(41)

“Me too,” I said.

“I mean, what about your assignment? I’m dying to know what they gave you. Something amazing, I’m sure.”

“Motivational speaker,” I said.

“What the devil is that?”

“I’m supposed to go around to different loops telling people about myself.”

She screwed up her face. “For what?”

“To . . . inspire them?”

She laughed so hard it actually hurt my feelings a little.

“Hey. It’s not that weird,” I said.

“Don’t take this the wrong way: I think you’re very inspiring. But I just . . . I can’t see it.”

“Me, neither. That’s why I’m not going to do it.”

“Really?” she said, impressed. “So what are you going to do?”

“Something else.”

“Oh. I see. Very mysterious.”

“Yep.”

“You’ll let me know?”

I smiled. “You’ll be the first.”

I didn’t want to keep Emma in the dark about my plans. I just didn’t exactly have plans yet, only a certainty that something would bubble up.

And then something did. There was a noise from the river—a splash followed by a loud drawing of breath.

Claire shouted, “Fish monster!”





We all turned to look, but what seemed like a sea creature at first glance turned out to be a heavyset man with pale fishy skin. He was swimming quickly alongside us, submerged but for his head and shoulders, propelled beneath the surface by something we couldn’t see.

“Ho there!” the man called out. “Young people, halt!”

We walked faster, but somehow the man was able to match our speed.

“I just want to ask you a question.”

“Everyone stop,” said Millard. “This man won’t hurt us. You’re peculiar, aren’t you?”

The man rose up and a pair of gills on his neck gasped open and spat out black water.

“My name is Itch,” the man answered, and whether he was peculiar was no longer in question. “I only want to know one thing. You are the wards of Alma Peregrine, correct?”

“That’s right,” said Olive, standing right at the edge of the Ditch to show she wasn’t afraid.

“And is it true you go where you like and will never age forward? That your internal clocks have reset?”

“That was two questions,” said Enoch.

“Yes, it’s true,” said Emma.

“I see,” Itch said. “And when can we have our clocks reset?”

“Who’s we?” asked Horace.

Four more heads popped up from of the water around him—two young boys with fins on their backs, an older woman with scaled skin, and a very old man with wide, fishy eyes, one on each side of his head. “My adoptive family,” Itch said. “We’ve been living in this cursed Ditch and breathing its polluted water for far too long.”

“Time for a change of scenery,” the fish-eyed man croaked.

“We want to go somewhere clean,” said the scaly woman.

“It’s not that easy,” said Emma. “What happened to us was accidental, and it could have killed us.”

“We don’t care,” said Itch.

“They just don’t want to share their secret!” said one of the finned boys.

“That’s not true,” said Millard. “We aren’t even sure if the reset could be re-created. The ymbrynes are still studying it.”

“The ymbrynes!” The woman spat black water from her gills. “Even if they knew, they’d never tell. Then we’d all leave their loops and they’d have nobody left to lord over.”

“Hey!” Claire shouted. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

“Downright treasonous,” said Bronwyn.

“Treason!” shouted Itch, and he swam to the edge and pulled himself up onto the pavement. We edged away from him as the water ran off his body, revealing a coat of long green algae that covered him from chest to feet. “That’s a dangerous word to bandy about.”

The boys pulled themselves up out of the Ditch and so did the woman—she was similarly clothed in algae—leaving only the old man in the water, swimming agitated circles.

“Look,” I said—I hadn’t spoken yet, and thought maybe I could calm things down. “We’re all peculiar here. There’s no reason to fight.”

“What do you know about it, newcomer?” said the woman.

“He thinks he’s our savior!” said Itch. “You’re nothing but a phony who got lucky.”

“False prophet!” shouted one of the boys, and then the other boy shouted it, too, and then they all were—“False prophet! False prophet!”—while closing in on us from three sides.

“I never claimed I was a prophet,” I tried to say. “I never claimed I was anything.”

Dozens of normal tenement-dwellers had leaned out of the windows of the building behind us, and now they were shouting, too, and raining garbage down on our heads.

“You people have been in that Ditch for too long!” Enoch shouted back. “Your brains are polluted!”