Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(83)

“When you say remedies, do you mean your solutions, your infusions, or your suspensions?”

“All of them!” Miss Wren shouted. “And quickly—this is an emergency!”

Then I saw the girl notice Miss Peregrine, and her eyes widened a bit—the most I’d seen her react to anything—and she started up the stairs.

This time, she was running.

*

I held Miss Wren’s arm, steadying her as we climbed the stairs. The building had four stories, and we were heading for the top. Aside from the stairwell, that was the only part of the building still accessible; the other floors were all frozen shut, walls of ice clogging their rooms and hallways. We were, in effect, climbing through the hollowed center of a gigantic ice cube.

I glanced into some of the frozen rooms as we hurried past them. Bulging tongues of ice had broken doors off their hinges, and through their splintered jambs I could see evidence of a raid: kicked-over furniture, drawers torn open, snows of paper on the floor. A machine gun leaned against a desk, its owner frozen in flight. A peculiar slumped in a corner beneath a slash of bullet holes. Like the victims of Pompeii, arrested in ice rather than ash.

It was hard to believe one girl could have been responsible for all this. Apart from ymbrynes, Althea had to be one of the most powerful peculiars I’d ever met. I looked up in time to see her disappear around the landing above us, that endless mane of hair trailing behind her like a blurred afterimage.

I snapped an icicle off the wall. “She really did all this?” I said, turning it in my hand.

“She did indeed,” said Miss Wren, puffing beside me. “She is—or was, I should say—apprenticed to the minister of obfuscation and deferment, and was here performing her duties on the day the corrupted raided the building. At the time she knew little of her power other than that her hands radiated unnatural cold. To hear Althea tell it, her ability was the sort of thing that came in useful during hot summer days, but which she’d never thought of as a defense weapon until two hollows began devouring the minister before her very eyes. In mortal fear, she called upon a well of power previously unknown to her, froze the room—and the hollows—and then the entire building, all in the space of a few minutes.”

“Minutes!” Emma said. “I don’t believe it.”

“I rather wish I’d been here to witness it,” said Miss Wren, “though if I had, I likely would’ve been kidnapped along with the other ymbrynes who were present at the time—Miss Nightjar, Miss Finch, and Miss Crow.”

“Her ice didn’t stop the wights?” I asked.

“It stopped many of them,” said Miss Wren. “Several are still with us, I imagine, frozen in the building’s recesses. But despite their losses, the wights ultimately got what they came for. Before the entire building froze, they managed to secrete the ymbrynes out through the roof.” Miss Wren shook her head bitterly. “I swear on my life, one day I’ll personally escort all those that hurt my sisters to Hell.”

“All that power she has didn’t do any good at all, then,” said Enoch.

“Althea wasn’t able to save the ymbrynes,” Miss Wren said, “but she made this place, and that’s blessing enough. Without it we’d have no refuge anywhere. I’ve been using it as our base of operations for the past few days, bringing back survivors from raided loops as I come across them. This is our fortress, the only safe place for peculiars in all of London.”

“And what of your efforts, madam?” said Millard. “The dog said you came here to help your sisters. Have you had any luck?”

“No,” she said quietly. “My efforts have not been successful.”

“Maybe Jacob can help you, Miss Wren,” Olive said. “He’s very special.”

Miss Wren looked sideways at me. “Is that so? And what is your talent, young man?”

“I can see hollows,” I said, a little embarrassed. “And sense them.”

“And kill them, sometimes,” added Bronwyn. “If we hadn’t found you, Miss Wren, Jacob was going to help us slip past the hollows that guard the punishment loops, so that we could rescue one of the ymbrynes being held there. In fact, maybe he could help you …”

“That’s kind of you,” said Miss Wren, “but my sisters are not being held in the punishment loops, or anywhere near London, I’m sure.”

“They aren’t?” I said.

“No, and they never were. That business about the punishment loops was a ruse concocted to ensnare those ymbrynes whom the corrupted weren’t able to capture in their raids. Namely, myself. And it nearly worked. Like a fool, I flew right into their trap—the punishment loops are prisons, after all! I’m lucky to have escaped with only a few scars to show for it.”

“Then where were the kidnapped ymbrynes taken?” asked Emma.

“I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew, because it’s none of your concern,” Miss Wren said. “It isn’t the duty of peculiar children to worry for the welfare of ymbrynes—it’s ours to worry for yours.”

“But, Miss Wren, that’s hardly fair,” Millard began, but she cut him short with a curt “I won’t hear anything else about it!” and that was that.

I was shocked by this sudden dismissal, especially considering that if we hadn’t worried about Miss Peregrine’s welfare—and risked our lives to bring her here!—she would’ve been condemned to spend the rest of her days trapped in the body of a bird. So it did seem like our duty to worry, since the ymbrynes had clearly not done a good enough job worrying to keep their loops from being raided. I didn’t like being talked down to that way, and judging from Emma’s knitted brow, she didn’t, either—but to have said so would’ve been unthinkably rude, so we finished our climb in awkward silence.