A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(91)
“Simple, straightforward detective work,” said Millard. “The best kind.”
“Okay,” I said, “what else did they do?”
“Periodical searches!” he said, weirdly excited. “Here, here.” He turned a lot of pages, then landed on the report he was looking for. “There was a young woman rapidly turning invisible. She was uncontacted and, if my own experiences can be brought to bear, almost certainly terrified. Abe’s goal was to find her before she could disappear altogether, and bring her into the fold of some benevolent peculiar clan—preferably other invisibles. But it would be difficult; the young woman had fled from every prior attempt at contact.”
“And they found her using the newspaper?” I said. “How?”
“They were able to pinpoint her location via headlines in a tabloid. Tabloids can’t always be taken seriously, but once in a while they do contain nuggets of truth. See?” He turned the page, and clipped to the backside of the mission log was a photo of a couple of kids on a beach and a newspaper crumpled in the sand. The headline was blurred but partially readable—something about a nude mystery girl.
“Thanks to this ridiculous article,” Millard continued, “they were able to track her to a beach town in California, and then to a particular beach. Beaches are terrible places to be invisible, because the sand gives your footsteps away, so they were able to corner her long enough to introduce themselves and explain what was happening to her, and she accepted their offer of help.”
“What if there are no newspaper headlines about our subject?” asked Emma. “And nothing so obvious as a carnival in town?”
“What if they’re in a school of three thousand kids who all look peculiar?” said Enoch.
“In such cases, where there’s a known location but no other lead, they would go to the area, blend in, and simply wait for the peculiar to give themselves away somehow.”
“A stakeout,” I said. “Like in the movies.”
“How long do stakeouts take?” Bronwyn asked.
“Weeks, sometimes longer.”
“Weeks!” said Enoch. “Longer!”
“We won’t need weeks,” I said. “We’ll go in the school. Talk to people. Ask around. You guys will just have to blend in.”
“That’ll be a snap, thanks to the extensive and thorough normalling lessons you’ve given us,” said Enoch.
“That was sarcasm!” said Bronwyn.
Enoch pointed at her. “Now you’re catching on.”
* * *
? ? ?
If I hadn’t been so tired, I’m sure the weirdness of sleeping on the pull-out sofa while Emma lay across the room would’ve kept me awake half the night. The distance between us felt unnatural, and in the rare moments of quiet we enjoyed, it preoccupied my mind completely. But the instant my head hit the pillow I was unconscious, and it seemed like only minutes had passed when I opened my eyes again to see Bronwyn bending over me, shaking my shoulder. Eight hours had disappeared in a dreamless blip, and though I hardly felt rested, it was already time to get moving again.
School would be starting in a couple of hours, and I wanted us to have the whole day to search. The one time-suck we allowed ourselves to indulge in was showers. Our hair was greasy and we had road dirt in our ears and under our nails. We would be representing all of peculiardom when we introduced ourselves to this person, whoever they were. At the very least, we agreed, we shouldn’t look like we’d all been sleeping in a car.
I showered first, then had some time to kill. I decided to do a newspaper search, like Abe and H had done in the case of the invisible girl. Such things were easier now, in the internet age, though I did have to leave the room and go back out of the loop so that my phone would function.
Standing by the ice machine in the hot, noisy present, I conducted a quick search for recent articles that mentioned the school. Within a short time, I found an article in the Brooklyn Eagle, dated a few weeks earlier, with the headline BIZARRE POWER OUTAGES MYSTIFY CON EDISON, FRAY NERVES AT HOOVER HIGH. The gist of the story was that, in the middle of a school day, during a presentation in the auditorium, all the lights had gone out. Eight hundred kids had been plunged into sudden blackness, and it had caused such chaos that there was a stampede, which led to injuries.
I thought that seemed strange. What was so terrifying about a blackout? It happened at our school, in lightning-storm-prone Florida, all the time. So I scrolled down to the comments, where actual students had posted, and learned that it was more than just a blackout. The generator-powered emergency lights failed, too. Strangest of all, one commenter wrote: “The flashlight on my cell didn’t work, and neither did anyone else’s.” The lights came on again a few minutes later, but by then the damage had been done.
To me, it sounded like an EMP—an electromagnetic pulse—that had knocked out devices, both electric and battery-powered. But there was another part of the story that didn’t fit that theory. Later that same day, there had been an explosion in the girls’ bathroom. Except it wasn’t exactly an explosion, according to the commenters.
“It looked like a flash bomb had gone off,” one person wrote. “The walls were burned and stuff, but nothing was broken.”
In other words, there was no blast damage. That meant it wasn’t a bomb, or a traditional explosion, or a fire. So what had happened?