Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(9)

I didn’t have the heart to keep arguing. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t think you’re right—but I do hope you are.” I felt bad for snapping at her before, but I’d been cold and scared and feeling defensive. I had good moments and bad, terrified thoughts and confident ones—though my terror-to-confidence ratio was pretty dismal at present, like three-to-one, and in the terrified moments it felt like I was being pushed into a role I hadn’t asked for; volunteered for front-line duty in a war, the full scope of which none of us yet knew. “Destiny” sounded like an obligation, and if I was to be thrust into battle against a legion of nightmare creatures, that had to be my choice.

Though in a sense the choice had been made already, when I agreed to sail into the unknown with these peculiar children. And it wasn’t true, if I really searched the dusty corners of myself, that I hadn’t asked for this. Really, I’d been dreaming of such adventures since I was small. Back then I’d believed in destiny, and believed in it absolutely, with every strand and fiber of my little kid heart. I’d felt it like an itch in my chest while listening to my grandfather’s extraordinary stories. One day that will be me. What felt like obligation now had been a promise back then—that one day I would escape my little town and live an extraordinary life, as he had done; and that one day, like Grandpa Portman, I would do something that mattered. He used to say to me: “You’re going to be a great man, Yakob. A very great man.”

“Like you?” I would ask him.

“Better,” he’d reply.

I’d believed him then, and I still wanted to. But the more I learned about him, the longer his shadow became, and the more impossible it seemed that I could ever matter the way he had. That maybe it would be suicidal even to try. And when I imagined myself trying, thoughts of my father crept in—my poor about-to-be-devastated father—and before I could push them out of my mind, I wondered how a great man could do something so terrible to someone who loved him.

I began to shiver. “You’re cold,” Emma said. “Let me finish what I started.” She picked up my other arm and kissed with her breath the whole length of it. It was almost more than I could handle. When she reached my shoulder, instead of placing the arm in my lap, she hung it around her neck. I lifted my other arm to join it, and she put her arms around me, too, and our foreheads nodded together.

Speaking very quietly, Emma said, “I hope you don’t regret the choice you made. I’m so glad you’re here with us. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I fear I wouldn’t be all right at all.”

I thought about going back. For a moment I really tried to play it out in my head, how it would be if I could somehow row one of our boats back to the island again, and go back home.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t imagine.

I whispered: “How could I?”

“When Miss Peregrine turns human again, she’ll be able to send you back. If you want to go.”

My question hadn’t been about logistics. I had meant, simply: How could I leave you? But those words were unsayable, couldn’t find their way past my lips. So I held them inside, and instead I kissed her.

This time it was Emma whose breath caught short. Her hands rose to my cheeks but stopped just shy of making contact. Heat radiated from them in waves.

“Touch me,” I said.

“I don’t want to burn you,” she said, but a sudden shower of sparks inside my chest said I don’t care, so I took her fingers and raked them along my cheek, and both of us gasped. It was hot but I didn’t pull away. Dared not, for fear she’d stop touching me. And then our lips met again and we were kissing again, and her extraordinary warmth surged through me.

My eyes fell closed. The world faded away.

If my body was cold in the night mist, I didn’t feel it. If the sea roared in my ears, I didn’t hear it. If the rock I sat on was sharp and jagged, I hardly noticed. Everything outside the two of us was a distraction.

And then a great crash echoed in the dark, but I thought nothing of it—could not take myself away from Emma—until the sound doubled and was joined by an awful shriek of metal, and a blinding light swept over us, and finally I couldn’t shut it out anymore.

The lighthouse, I thought. The lighthouse is falling into the sea. But the lighthouse was a pinpoint in the distance, not a sun-bright flash, and its light only traveled in one direction, not back and forth, searching.

It wasn’t a lighthouse at all. It was a searchlight—and it was coming from the water close to shore.

It was the searchlight of a submarine.

*

Brief second of terror in which brain and legs were disconnected. My eyes and ears registered the submarine not far from shore: metal beast rising from the sea, water rushing from its sides, men bursting onto its deck from open hatches, shouting, training cannons of light at us. And then the stimulus reached my legs and we slid, fell, and pitched ourselves down from the rocks and ran like hell.

The spotlight threw our pistoning shadows across the beach, ten feet tall and freakish. Bullets pocked the sand and buzzed the air.

A voice boomed from a loudspeaker. “STOP! DO NOT RUN!”

We burst into the cave—They’re coming, they’re here, get up, get up—but the children had heard the commotion and were already on their feet—all but Bronwyn, who had so exhausted herself at sea that she had fallen asleep against the cave wall and couldn’t be roused. We shook her and shouted in her face, but she only moaned and brushed us away with a sweep of her arm. Finally we had to hoist her up by the waist, which was like lifting a tower of bricks, but once her feet touched the ground, her red-rimmed eyelids split open and she took her own weight.