A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(56)

“In my opinion, we’re much too concerned with what Miss Peregrine thinks,” said Emma.

“I think missions like the ones my grandfather and his group used to do are what we’re supposed to be doing,” I said. “Not glorified office work for the reconstruction.”

“I like my assignment,” said Hugh.

“But we’re wasted in the Acre,” said Millard. “We can go fearlessly into the present. Who else with our level of experience can do that?”

“She didn’t mean we should go now,” said Hugh. “We’ve only had one day of normalling lessons!”

“You could be ready,” I said.

“Half of us don’t even have modern clothes yet!” said Horace.

“We’ll figure it out!” I said. “Look, there are peculiar children in America who need our help, and I think that’s more important than rebuilding some loops.”

“Hear, hear,” said Emma.

“There’s one who needs help,” said Hugh. “Maybe. If this H fellow isn’t lying.”

“Abe’s logbook is filled with hundreds of missions,” I said, trying not to show my rising frustration, “half of which involved helping young peculiars in danger. Peculiars didn’t stop being born after Abe stopped working. They’re still out there, and they still need help.”

“They have no real ymbrynes of their own,” said Emma.

“This is why you’re here,” I said. “This is what we’re supposed to do. The hollow-hunters got old, the ymbrynes are too busy having meetings, and there’s no one more equipped to help than us. This is our time!”

“If we can just prove it to some guy we don’t even know!” Enoch said sarcastically.

“It’s a test,” I said. “And it’s one I intend to pass. Anybody who feels the same, be downstairs with a bag packed at nine a.m. sharp.”





I was packing a bag in my room later that night when my eyes stopped on something: the maps plastered on the wall above my bed. There were layers upon layers of them, taped and tacked over one another in a big mosaic that had become, over time, little more than wallpaper to me. But I noticed something now that grabbed my attention, and I stopped what I was doing to climb onto my bed. I stood on my pillows to study a little drawing that peeked out from under three intersecting National Geographic maps: a cartoon alligator sipping a cocktail.

I untacked the maps that were on top of it and peeled them away to find an old place mat from the Mel-O-Dee, the one with the map of Florida on it. The Mel-O-Dee used to give out crayons for kids to draw with while they ate, and my grandfather and I had used them to decorate this place mat. I had forgotten about that day, or that this map was even here. But now I saw what Abe had done—it was mostly his steady hand that had drawn on this map. Right in the center he had circled Mermaid Fantasyland, just as H’s wet glass had. Abe had also drawn a little skull and crossbones beside it. Deep in the Everglades swamp, he had doodled a school of fish with legs. (Or were they people with fish heads?) He had also drawn spiral shapes in several places around the state, and if I remembered the legend from Miss Peregrine’s now-lost Map of Days correctly, that meant LOOP HERE. There were a few other symbols I couldn’t decipher, too.

We don’t make maps, H had said. But if that was one of the hollow-hunters’ laws, Abe had broken it by drawing me this one. And in doing it, he had taken a risk.

The question was, why?

I took the map down carefully, then I scoured the rest of the wall for anything Abe had drawn on. What other bread crumbs had he left for me, hiding in plain sight? I worked myself into a frenzy, taking down anything that had been annotated or added to. I found a few maps that had been drawn from scratch on blank construction paper, but they weren’t labeled and there were no boundary lines around them with shapes I could recognize. There was a AAA map of Maryland and Delaware that had markings on it, so I folded it and stacked it with the Mel-O-Dee map. There were a couple of postcards pinned to the wall from places Abe had traveled through—motels, roadside tourist traps, towns I’d never heard of. Abe only stopped traveling when I was about eleven. Despite my parents’ objections, he used to go on road trips by himself “to visit friends out of state,” and while he never bothered to call my dad to check in, he would always send me postcards from the places he went. I didn’t know if they had any relevance, but I stacked them with the maps, just in case, and slid them all inside a hardcover book. Then I put that in my duffel bag, on top of the changes of clothes I’d packed. Earlier in the day I had gathered up whatever cash I could find around the house, which wasn’t a lot except for the wad my parents kept in a sock in one of their dresser drawers. I wrapped it in a rubber band and packed it into my old plastic Pokémon lunch box with some basic toiletries, including a package of Tums and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, in case we spent any appreciable time near a hollowgast.

I was about to zip the whole thing shut when I thought of something. I knelt down and pulled Abe’s operations log out from under the bed. I picked it up and weighed it in my hand, trying to decide whether to take it. It was fat and heavy and full of sensitive information that H would almost certainly not want me exposing to possible loss or theft. I knew I probably should have locked it in Abe’s bunker for safekeeping. But what if I needed it? It was packed with photos and clues about how Abe and H had done their work. It was a gold mine.