Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(84)

We came to the top of the stairs. Only a few of the doorways on this level were iced over. Miss Wren took Miss Peregrine from Horace and said, “Come on, Alma, let’s see what can be done for you.”

Althea appeared in an open door, her face flushed, chest heaving. “Your room’s all ready, mistress. Everything you asked for.”

“Good, good,” said Miss Wren.

“If we can do anything to help you,” Bronwyn said, “anything at all …”

“All I need is time and quiet,” Miss Wren replied. “I’ll save your ymbryne, young ones. On my life I will.” And she turned and took Miss Peregrine into the room with Althea.

Not knowing what else to do with ourselves, we drifted after her and congregated around the door, which had been left open a crack. We took turns peeking inside. In a cozy room dimly lit by oil lamps, Miss Wren sat in a rocking chair holding Miss Peregrine in her lap. Althea stood mixing vials of liquid at a lab table. Every so often she’d lift a vial and swirl it, then walk to Miss Peregrine and pass it under her beak—much the way smelling salts are waved under the nose of someone who’s fainted. All the while, Miss Wren rocked in the chair and stroked Miss Peregrine’s feathers, singing her a soft, lilting lullaby:

“Eft kaa vangan soorken, eft ka vangan soorken, malaaya …”

“That’s the tongue of the old peculiars,” Millard whispered.

“Come home, come home … remember your true self … something like that.”

Miss Wren heard him and looked up, then waved us away. Althea crossed the room and shut the door.

“Well, then,” said Enoch. “I can see we’re not wanted here.”

After three days of the headmistress depending on us for everything, we had suddenly become extraneous. Though we were grateful to Miss Wren, she’d made us all feel a bit like children who’d been ordered to bed.

“Miss Wren knows her business,” came a Russian-accented voice from behind us. “Best leave her to it.”

We turned to see the stick-thin folding man from the carnival, standing with his bony arms crossed.

“You!” said Emma.

“We meet again,” the folding man said, his voice deep as an ocean trench. “My name is Sergei Andropov, and I am captain of peculiar resistance army. Come, I will show you around.”

*

“I knew he was peculiar!” Olive said.

“No, you didn’t,” said Enoch. “You only thought he was.”

“I knew you were peculiar the second I saw you,” said the folding man. “How you weren’t captured long time ago?”

“Because we’re wily,” said Hugh.

“He means lucky,” I said.

“But mostly just hungry,” said Enoch. “Got any food around here? I could eat an emu-raffe.”

At the mere mention of food, my stomach growled like a wild animal. None of us had eaten since our train ride to London, which seemed eons ago.

“Of course,” said the folding man. “This way.”

We followed him down the hall.

“So tell me about this peculiar army of yours,” Emma said.

“We will crush the wights and take back what’s ours. Punish them for kidnapping our ymbrynes.” He opened a door off the hallway and led us through a wrecked office where people lay sleeping on the floor and under desks. As we stepped around them, I recognized a few of their faces from the carnival: the plain-looking boy, the frizzy-haired snake-charmer girl.

“They’re all peculiar?” I asked.

The folding man nodded. “Rescued from other loops,” he said, holding a door open for us.

“And you?” said Millard. “Where did you come from?”

The folding man led us into a vestibule where we could talk without disturbing the sleepers, a room dominated by two large wooden doors emblazoned with dozens of bird insignias. “I come from land of frozen desert beyond Icy Waste,” he said. “Hundred years ago, when hollows first born, they strike my home first. Everything destroy. All in village killed. Old woman. Baby. All.” He made a chopping motion in the air with his hand. “I hide in butter churn, breathe through reed of straw, while own brother killed in same house. After, I come to London to escape the hollows. But they come, too.”

“That’s awful,” said Bronwyn. “I’m so sorry for you.”

“One day we take revenge,” he said, his face darkening.

“You mentioned that,” said Enoch. “How many are in your army, then?”

“Right now six,” he said, gesturing to the room we’d just left.

“Six people?!” said Emma. “You mean … them?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“With you, makes seventeen. We growing quick.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “We didn’t come here to join any army.”

He gave me a look that could freeze Hell, then turned and threw open the double doors.

We followed him into a large room dominated by a massive oval table, its wood polished to a mirror shine. “This is Ymbryne Council meeting place,” the folding man said.

All around us were portraits of famous old peculiars, not framed but drawn directly onto the walls in oil and charcoal and grease pencil. The one closest to me was a face with wide, staring eyes and an open mouth, inside of which was a real, functioning water fountain. Around its mouth was a motto written in Dutch, which Millard, standing next to me, translated: “From the mouths of our elders comes a fountain of wisdom.”