Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(23)

She’d been waging a battle against tears, but now, in a sudden break, she lost it. She sank to the ground and sobbed, a storm overtaking her. I knelt and wrapped my arms around her and hung on. “I’m so sorry,” she said, repeating it three times, her voice raw, a fraying rope. “You never should’ve stayed. I shouldn’t have let you. But I was selfish … so terribly selfish!”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “I’m here—I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

That only seemed to make her cry harder. I pressed my lips to her forehead and kissed it until the storm began to pass out of her, the sobs fading to whimpers. “Please talk to me,” I said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

After a minute she sat up, wiped her eyes, and tried to compose herself. “I had hoped I’d never have to say this,” she said. “That it wouldn’t matter. Do you remember when I told you, the night you decided to come with us, that you might never be able to go home again?”

“Of course I do.”

“I didn’t know until just now how true that really was. I’m afraid I’ve doomed you, Jacob, my sweet friend, to a short life trapped in a dying world.” She drew a quivering breath, then continued. “You came to us through Miss Peregrine’s loop, and that means only Miss Peregrine or her loop can send you back. But her loop is gone now—or if it isn’t yet, it will be soon—which leaves Miss Peregrine herself as your only way home. But if she never turns human again …”

I swallowed hard, my throat dry. “Then I’m stuck in the past.”

“Yes. And the only way to return to the time you knew as your own would be to wait for it—day by day, year by year.”

Seventy years. By then my parents, and everyone I ever knew or cared about, would be dead, and I’d be long dead to all of them. Of course, provided we survived whatever tribulations we were about to face, I could always go and find my parents in a few decades, once they were born—but what would be the point? They’d be children, and strangers to me.

I wondered when my present-day back-home parents would give up on finding me alive. What story they’d tell themselves to make sense of my disappearance. Had I run away? Gone insane? Thrown myself off a sea cliff?

Would they have a funeral for me? Buy me a coffin? Write my name on a gravestone?

I’d become a mystery they would never solve. A wound that would never heal.

“I’m so sorry,” Emma said again. “If I’d known Miss Peregrine’s condition was so dire, I swear to you, I never would’ve asked you to stay. The present means nothing to the rest of us. It’ll kill us if we stay there too long! But you—you still have family, a life …”

“No!” I said, shouting, slapping the ground with my hand—chasing away the self-pitying thoughts that had started to cloud my head. “That’s all gone now. I chose this.”

Emma laid her hand atop mine and said gently: “If what the animals say is true, and all our ymbrynes have been kidnapped, soon even this won’t be here.” She gathered some dirt in her hand and scattered it in the breeze. “Without ymbrynes to maintain them, our loops will collapse. The wights will use the ymbrynes to re-create their damned experiment and it’ll be 1908 all over again—and either they’ll fail and turn all creation into a smoking crater, or they’ll succeed and make themselves immortal, and we’ll be ruled by those monsters. Either way, before long we’ll be more extinct than the peculiar animals! And now I’ve dragged you into this hopeless mess—and for what?”

“Everything happens for a reason,” I said.

I couldn’t believe those words had come out of my mouth, but as soon as they were spoken I felt the truth of them, resonating in me loud as a bell.

I was here for a reason. There was something I was meant not simply to be, but to do—and it wasn’t to run or hide or give up the minute things seemed terrifying and impossible.

“I thought you didn’t believe in destiny,” said Emma, assessing me skeptically.

I didn’t—not exactly—but I wasn’t quite sure how to explain what I did believe, either. I thought back to the stories my grandfather used to tell me. They were filled with wonder and adventure, but something deeper ran through them, as well—a sense of abiding gratitude. As a kid I’d focused on Grandpa Portman’s descriptions of a magical-sounding island and peculiar children with fantastic powers, but at heart his stories were about Miss Peregrine, and how, in a time of great need, she had helped him. When he arrived in Wales, my grandfather had been a young, frightened boy who didn’t speak the language, a boy hunted by two kinds of monsters: one that would eventually kill most of his family, and the other, cartoonishly grotesque and invisible to all but him, which must’ve seemed lifted directly from his nightmares. In the face of all this, Miss Peregrine had hidden him, given him a home, and helped him discover who he really was—she had saved his life, and in doing so had enabled my father’s life, and by extension, my own. My parents had birthed and raised and loved me, and for that I owed them a debt. But I would never have been born in the first place if not for the great and selfless kindness Miss Peregrine had shown my grandfather. I was coming to believe I had been sent here to repay that debt—my own, my father’s, and my grandfather’s, too.