Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(67)

A man in a metal hat stuck his head out of a doorway and shouted, “You are advised to take cover!” then ducked back inside.

Sure, I thought, but where? Maybe we could hide in the debris and the chaos around us, and with so much noise and distraction everywhere, the hollows would pass us by. But we were still too close to them, our trail too fresh. I warned my friends not to use their abilities, no matter what, and Emma and I led them zigzagging through the streets, hoping this would make us harder to track.

Still, I could feel them coming. They were out in the open now, out of the cathedral, lurching after us, invisible to all but me. I wondered if even I would be able to see them here, in the dark: shadow creatures in a shadow city.

We ran until my lungs burned. Until Olive couldn’t keep up anymore and Bronwyn had to scoop her into her arms. Down long blocks of blacked-out windows staring like lidless eyes. Past a bombed library snowing ash and burning papers. Through a bombed cemetery, long-forgotten Londoners unearthed and flung into trees, grinning in rotted formal wear. A curlicued swing set in a cratered playground. The horrors piled up, incomprehensible, the bombers now and then dropping flares to light it all with the pure, shining white of a thousand camera flashes. As if to say: Look. Look what we made.

Nightmares come to life, all of it. Like the hollows themselves.

Don’t look don’t look don’t look …

I envied the blind brothers, navigating a mercifully detail-free topography; the world in wireframe. I wondered, briefly, what their dreams looked like—or if they dreamt at all.

Emma jogged alongside me, her wavy, powder-coated hair flowing behind her. “Everyone’s knackered,” she said. “We can’t keep going like this!”

She was right. Even the fittest of us were flagging now, and soon the hollows would catch up to us and we’d have to face them in the middle of the street. And that would be a bloodbath. We had to find cover.

I steered us toward a row of houses. Because bomber pilots were more likely to target a cheerfully lit house than another smudge in the dark, every house was blacked out—every porch light dark, every window opaque. An empty house would be safest for us, but blacked out like this, there was no way to tell which houses were occupied and which weren’t. We’d have to pick one at random.

I stopped us in the road.

“What are you doing?” Emma said, puffing to catch her breath.

“Are you mad?”

“Maybe,” I said, and then I grabbed Horace, swept my hand toward the row of houses, and said, “Choose.”

“What?” he said. “Why me?”

“Because I trust your random guesses more than my own.”

“But I never dreamed about this!” he protested.

“Maybe you did and don’t remember,” I said. “Choose.”

Realizing there was no way out of it, he swallowed hard, closed his eyes for a second, then turned and pointed to a house behind us. “That one.”

“Why that one?” I asked.

“Because you made me choose!” Horace said angrily.

That would have to do.

*

The front door was locked. No problem: Bronwyn wrenched off the knob and tossed it into the street, and the door creaked open on its own. We filed into a dark hallway lined with family photos, the faces impossible to make out. Bronwyn closed the door and blocked it with a table she found in the hall.

“Who’s there?” came a voice from further inside the house.

Damn. We weren’t alone. “You were supposed to pick an empty house,” I said to Horace.

“I’m going to hit you very hard,” Horace muttered.

There was no time to switch houses. We’d have to introduce ourselves to whoever was here and hope they were friendly.

“Who is there!” the voice demanded.

“We aren’t thieves or Germans or anything like that!” Emma said. “Just here to take cover!”

No response.

“Stay here,” Emma told the others, and then she pulled me after her down the hall. “We’re coming to say hello!” she called out, loud and friendly. “Don’t shoot us, please!”

We walked to the end of the hall and rounded a corner, and there, standing in a doorway, was a girl. She held a wicked-down lantern in one hand and a letter opener in the other, and her hard, black eyes flicked nervously between Emma and me. “There’s nothing of value here!” she said. “This house has been looted already.”

“I told you, we’re not thieves!” Emma said, offended.

“And I told you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll scream and … and my father will come running with his … guns and things!”

The girl looked at once childish and prematurely adult. She had her hair in a short bob and wore a little girl’s dress with big white buttons trailing down the front, but something in her stony expression made her seem older, world-weary at twelve or thirteen.

“Please don’t scream,” I said, thinking not about her probably fictitious father but about what other things might come running.

Then a small voice piped up behind her, through the doorway she’d been conspicuously blocking. “Who’s there, Sam?”

The girl’s face pinched in frustration. “Only some children,” she said. “I asked you to keep quiet, Esme.”