A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(58)

I shut the glove box and got out of the car. Emma had a funny look on her face. “What?”

“I wonder if Abe was even his real name,” she said.

It wasn’t a crazy question, but for some reason it stung me.

“It was.”

She looked at me. “You sure about that?”

In her eyes was an unasked question. If Abe was capable of such deceit, was I?

“I’m sure,” I said, and turned away. “It’s almost nine. Let’s pick a car and go.”

“You’re driving. You choose.”

It was an easy choice. The Caprice was more practical—it had four doors rather than two, more trunk space, and would attract less attention on the road. But the other car was much, much cooler and faster-looking, and after three whole seconds of deliberation, I pointed to it and said, “This one.” I had never been on a road trip before (just across the fat belly of Florida to visit cousins in Miami, which hardly counted), and the idea of doing one in this car was too tempting to resist.

We got in. I opened the garage door and started the engine, which roared to life with a glorious, throaty growl that made Emma startle. As I backed it out of the driveway into the street, I saw her roll her eyes.

“Just like Abe!” she said, shouting over the engine.

“What is?”

“To have a car like this for secret missions.”

I left the car idling in the street, parked my parents’ car in Abe’s garage, and closed the door. Then I got back into the mystery coupe, grinned at Emma, and stamped my foot down on the accelerator. The engine barked like an animal as we peeled out and were thrown back into our seats.

Sometimes you have to have a little fun. Even on a secret mission.



* * *



? ? ?

While Emma and I were gone, Miss Peregrine had returned from her all-night meeting in the Acre and collapsed in her bed upstairs—one of the rare times I’d known her to actually sleep. We convened all the kids in a downstairs bedroom and shut the door, so our voices wouldn’t wake her.

I asked for a show of hands.

“Who’s in?”

Enoch, Olive, and Millard raised their hands. Claire, Hugh, Bronwyn, and Horace did not.

“Missions make me nervous,” said Horace.

“Claire,” Emma said, “why isn’t your hand up?”

“We already have missions,” she said. “I’m head of lunch and dessert distribution to all the loop reconstruction teams in Belgium.”

“That’s not a mission, Claire, that’s a job.”

“You’re delivering packages!” Claire sneered. “How is that a mission?”

“The mission is helping a peculiar in danger,” said Millard. “After the packages are delivered.”

“Bronwyn, what about you?” I said. “In or out?”

“Lying to Miss P makes me uncomfortable. Shouldn’t we tell her about this?”

“NO,” everyone but Claire said in unison.

“Why not?” asked Bronwyn.

“It makes me uncomfortable, too,” I said, “but she’ll stop us from going, so we can’t.”

“If we really want to help peculiarkind, this is how,” said Emma. “By becoming the next generation of fighters, not posing for photo opportunities in the Acre.”

“Or asking permission every time we want to do anything,” said Enoch.

“Exactly!” said Millard. “The headmistress still treats us like children. We’re all nearly a century old, for bird’s sake, and it’s about time we started acting our age. Or half our age, anyway. We’ve got to start making decisions for ourselves.”

“Just what I’ve been saying for years,” said Enoch.

My peculiar friends had changed, I realized, but Miss Peregrine’s way of parenting them had not. They had gotten a big dose of freedom after being chased from Cairnholm—as had I—and their time in the Acre, under the supervision of not just one, but more than a dozen ymbrynes, had left them feeling suffocated. They had grown up more in the past few months than they had in the past half century.

“What about you, Apiston?” Emma said to Hugh.

“I would come,” he said, “but I’ve got my own mission to do.”

We knew what he meant without having to say it. He would be searching the Panloopticon for Fiona.

“We understand,” I said. “We’ll keep a lookout for her on our travels.”

He nodded heavily. “Thanks, Jacob.”

They were all in except for Horace, Claire, and Bronwyn—and then Bronwyn changed her mind.

“Okay, I’ll come. I don’t like lying, but if we’re really out to help a peculiar child whose life in is danger, and lying is the only way to do that, then it would be immoral not to lie, wouldn’t it?”

“That idea went past smart and back to dumb,” said Claire.

“Welcome aboard,” said Emma.

All that was left was to choose our crew. I said we could only take two, which elicited some groans of disappointment. Despite what I’d said the night before, I was a little worried about their one half of a normalling lesson and a potential lack of preparedness to face the modern world. And while I wanted and needed their help, I also needed to focus on our mission, not on explaining how crosswalks and elevator doors and simple interactions with modern normals worked. But instead of going into all that, which might have hurt their feelings, I claimed I didn’t want to overload the car.