Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(93)

“Are there loops in these places?” asked Olive, pointing to a void that stretched across much of China. “Are there peculiars there, like us?”

“Certainly there are,” Millard said. “Peculiarness is determined by genes, not geography. But large portions of the peculiar world have simply not been explored.”

“Why not?”

“I suppose we were too busy surviving.”

It occurred to me that the business of surviving precluded a great many things, exploring and falling in love not least among them.

We turned more pages, hunting for blank spots. There were many, and all had fanciful names. The Mournful Kingdom of Sand. The Land Made in Anger. A High Place Full of Stars. I mouthed the words silently to myself, appreciating their roundness.

At the margins lurked fearsome places the Map called Wastes. The far north of Scandinavia was The Icy Waste. The middle of Borneo: The Stifling Waste. Much of the Arabian peninsula: The Pitiless Waste. The southern tip of Patagonia: The Cheerless Waste. Certain places weren’t represented at all. New Zealand. Hawaii. Florida, which was just an ingrown nub at America’s foot, barely there.

Looking at the Map of Days, even the places that sounded most forbidding evoked in me a strange longing. It reminded me of long-ago afternoons spent with my grandfather studying historic maps in National Geographic—maps drawn long before the days of airplanes and satellites, when high-resolution cameras couldn’t see into the world’s every nook and cranny. When the shape of now-familiar coastlines was guesswork. When the depths and dimensions of icy seas and forbidding jungles were cobbled together from rumors and legends and the wild-eyed ramblings of expeditioners who’d lost half their party exploring them.

While Millard rambled on about the history of the Map, I traced with my finger a vast and trackless desert in Asia. Where the Winged Creature Ends Not Its Flight. Here was a whole world yet to be discovered, and I had only just cracked its surface. The thought filled me with regret—but also a shameful kind of relief. I would see my home again, after all, and my parents. And maybe it was childish, this old urge to explore for exploring’s sake. There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret.

Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

And then I told them. There was no point in waiting any longer. I just blurted it out: “I’m leaving,” I said. “When this is all over, I’m going back home.”

There was a moment of shocked silence. Emma met my eyes, finally, and I could see tears standing in them.

Then Bronwyn got up from the table and threw her arms around me. “Brother,” she said. “We’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” I said. “More than I can say.”

“But why?” said Olive, floating up to my eye level. “Was I too irritating?”

I put my hand on her head and pushed her back down to the floor. “No, no, it’s got nothing to do with you,” I said. “You were great, Olive.”

Emma stepped forward. “Jacob came here to help us,” she said. “But he has to go back to his old life, while it’s still there waiting for him.”

The children seemed to understand. There was no anger. Most of them seemed genuinely happy for me.

Miss Wren popped her head into the room to give us a quick update—everything was going marvelously, she said. Miss Peregrine was well on her way to recovery. She’d be ready by morning. And then Miss Wren was gone again.

“Thank the gods,” said Horace.

“Thank the birds,” said Hugh.

“Thank the gods and the birds,” said Bronwyn. “All the birds in all the trees in all the forests.”

“Thank Jacob, too,” said Millard. “We never would’ve made it this far without him.”

“We never even would’ve made it off the island,” said Bronwyn. “You’ve done so much for us, Jacob.”

They all came and hugged me, each of them, one by one. Then they drifted away and only Emma was left, and she hugged me last—a long, bittersweet embrace that felt too much like goodbye.

“Asking you to leave was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” she said. “I’m glad you came around. I don’t think I’d have had the strength to ask again.”

“I hate this,” I said. “I wish there were a world where we could be together in peace.”

“I know,” she said. “I know, I know.”

“I wish …,” I started to say.

“Stop,” she said.

I said it anyway. “I wish you could come home with me.”

She looked away. “You know what would happen to me if I did.”

“I know.”

Emma disliked long goodbyes. I could feel her steeling herself, trying to pull her pain inside. “So,” she said, businesslike. “Logistics. When Miss Peregrine turns human, she’ll lead you back through the carnival, into the underground, and when you pass through the changeover, you’ll be back in the present. Think you can manage from there?”

“I think so,” I said. “I’ll call my parents. Or go to a police station, or something. I’m sure there’s a poster of my face in every precinct in Britain by now, knowing my dad.” I laughed a little, because if I hadn’t, I might’ve started crying.