A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(88)

“You’re getting overwhelmed,” said Emma. “Big tasks always seem that way if you try and figure out every little piece of them beforehand. We have to take it bit by bit.”

“It’s like that old saying,” said Millard. “About eating a grimbear?”

“That’s revolting,” Bronwyn said into her hands.

“It’s just a metaphor. Nobody actually eats grimbears.”

“I bet someone does,” said Enoch. “Do you think they grill them or just eat them raw?”

“Shut up,” Emma said. “You do it one bite at a time, that’s how. So let’s concentrate on the next bite, and then we’ll worry about the one after that. We’ll find the peculiar. Then we’ll worry about finding the loop. Okay?”

Bronwyn raised her head and peeked at Emma through her fingers. “Can we use a different metaphor?”

Emma laughed. “Sure.”

After a while rush hour began to ease its grip on us. Then we were free of traffic and hurtling toward Philadelphia, and after that New York, and all the unknowns waiting for us there. We sank into silence, contemplating the next bite.





I had done and been through a lot of crazy things that summer, but driving into New York City for the first time ranked among the most intense. It was a stressful blur of honking cars and changing lanes and suffocating tunnels and vertiginous bridges. My friends were shouting at me to watch out for this or that hazard while I white-knuckled the wheel and sweat pooled in the small of my back. Somehow, after countless near-collisions and missed turns, the directions provided by the unflappably bland robot voice from my phone got us to within a block of our destination: J. Edgar Hoover High School. I didn’t know New York geography well at all—I had only been there once, as a young kid, on a trip with my parents—but Hoover High wasn’t near any landmarks I recognized from TV or the movies. This was Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and not even one of the “hipster” neighborhoods of Brooklyn I’d heard about. This was like a dingier, more crowded version of suburbia, with smaller, older houses packed tight together and cars jamming the sides of the streets.

We found the school easily enough. It was an imposing, block-long edifice of brick punctuated now and then by windows, the kind of place that could have been a minimum-security prison or a wastewater treatment plant or any number of institutions, but in this case housed a few thousand impressionable young minds. In other words, it looked a lot like the high school I attended in Florida, and the thought of going in gave me pit sweats.

It was the middle of the afternoon. We parked across the street and sat watching the building from the car, debating our first move.

“So, how’s that detailed plan of ours shaping up?” asked Enoch.

“Perhaps we just go inside and have a look round,” said Millard. “See if anyone catches our eye.”

“Thousands of kids go to this school,” I said. “I don’t think we’re going to find the peculiar one just by looking.”

“We don’t know until we’ve tired,” Millard said, and then he yawned. “I mean, tried.”

“I’m tired, too,” said Bronwyn. “My brain feels like mush.”

“Mine too,” I said.

Bronwyn offered me the thermos of coffee Paul had given us—still half full but long since cold—but I couldn’t stomach it. I was both wired and tired, and coffee was just making me jittery. We’d been going nonstop for over twenty-four hours, and I was starting to come apart at the seams.

We heard the school bell ring. Thirty seconds later its front doors flung open and students began to flood outside. In seconds the courtyard was filled with teenagers.

“Here’s our chance,” said Bronwyn. “Any of them look peculiar?”

A boy with a purple mohawk walked by us on the sidewalk, followed by a girl in drop-crotch pants and paisley combat boots and a hundred other kids with their own quirks of style and dress.

“Yeah,” Emma said. “All of them.”

“It’s useless anyway,” said Enoch. “If the person we’re looking for is in danger, then they’re scared, and if they’re scared, they’re going to try and blend in, not stand out.”

“Ah, so we’re looking for someone who seems suspiciously normal,” said Bronwyn. “Too normal.”

“No, you idiot, I meant we’re not going to find them by looking at all. Any other ideas?”

We scanned the masses as they streamed past for another minute, but it was clear that Enoch was right. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

“Maybe we should, I don’t know, ask people,” said Emma.

Enoch laughed. “Yes, excuse me, we were looking for someone with strange powers or abilities? Or perhaps an extra mouth in the back of their head?”

“You know who would know?” I said. “Abe.”

Enoch rolled his eyes. “He’s dead, remember?”

“But he left us a how-to guide. Or the closest thing we’re going to get to one.” I reached under Emma’s legs and pulled Abe’s operations log from the footwell.

“Perhaps you’re onto something,” said Millard. “That’s every mission he and H ran for thirty-five years. They had to have been in situations like this. We’ll just find out what they did.”