Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(97)
Those of us who weren’t reeling in horror frothed with anger. Several people were shouting that Caul should be killed, and were busily hunting for sharp objects to do the job with, while the few who’d kept their heads were trying to hold them back. All the while, Caul stood calmly, waiting for the furor to die down.
“If I may?” he said. “I wouldn’t entertain any ideas about killing me. You could, of course; no one can stop you. But it will go much easier for you if I am unharmed when my men arrive.” He pretended to check a nonexistent watch on his wrist. “Ah, yes,” he said, “they should be here now—yes, just about now—surrounding the building, covering every conceivable point of exit, including the roof. And might I add, there are fifty-six of them and they are armed positively to the teeth. Beyond the teeth. Have you ever seen what a mini-gun can do to a child-sized human body?” He looked directly at Olive and said, “It would turn you to cat’s meat, darling.”
“You’re bluffing!” said Enoch. “There’s no one out there!”
“I assure you, there is. They’ve been watching me closely since we left your depressing little island, and I gave my signal to them the moment Balenciaga revealed herself to us. That was over twelve hours ago—more than ample time to muster a fighting force.”
“Allow me to verify this,” said Miss Wren, and she left to go to the ymbryne meeting room, where the windows were obstructed from ice mostly from the outside, and a few had small telescope tunnels melted through them with mirror attachments that let us look down at the street below.
While we waited for her to return, the clown and the snake girl debated the best ways to torture Caul.
“I say we pull out his toenails first,” said the clown. “Then stick hot pokers in his eyes.”
“Where I come from,” the snake girl said, “the punishment for treason is being covered in honey, bound to an open boat, and floated out into a stagnant pond. The flies eat you alive.”
Caul stood cricking his neck from side to side and stretching his arms boredly. “Apologies,” he said. “Remaining a bird for so long tends to cramp the muscles.”
“You think we’re kidding?” said the clown.
“I think you’re amateurs,” said Caul. “If you found a few young bamboo shoots, I could show you something really wicked. As delightful as that would be, though, I do recommend you melt this ice, because it’ll save us all a world of trouble. I say this for your sake, out of genuine concern for your well-being.”
“Yeah, right,” said Emma. “Where was your concern when you were stealing those peculiars’ souls?”
“Ah, yes. Our three pioneers. Their sacrifice was necessary—all for the sake of progress, my dears. What we’re trying to do is advance the peculiar species, you see.”
“What a joke,” she said. “You’re nothing but power-hungry sadists!”
“I know you’re all quite sheltered and uneducated,” said Caul, “but did your ymbrynes not teach you about our people’s history? We peculiars used to be like gods roaming the earth! Giants—kings—the world’s rightful rulers! But over the centuries and millennia, we’ve suffered a terrible decline. We mixed with normals to such an extent that the purity of our peculiar blood has been diluted almost to nothing. And now look at us, how degraded we’ve become! We hide in these temporal backwaters, afraid of the very people we should be ruling, arrested in a state of perpetual childhood by this confederacy of busybodies—these women! Don’t you see how they’ve reduced us? Are you not ashamed? Do you have any idea of the power that’s rightfully ours? Don’t you feel the blood of giants in your veins?” He was losing his cool now, going red in the face. “We aren’t trying to eradicate peculiardom—we’re trying to save it!”
“Is that right?” said the clown, and then walked over to Caul and spat right in his face. “Well, you’ve got a twisted way of going at it.”
Caul wiped the spit away with the back of his hand. “I knew it would be pointless to reason with you. The ymbrynes have been feeding you lies and propaganda for a hundred years. Better, I think, to take your souls and start again fresh.”
Miss Wren returned. “He speaks the truth,” she said. “There must be fifty soldiers out there. All of them armed.”
“Oh, oh, oh,” moaned Bronwyn, “what are we to do?”
“Give up,” said Caul. “Go quietly.”
“It doesn’t matter how many of them there are,” Althea said.
“They’ll never be able to get through all my ice.”
The ice! I’d nearly forgotten. We were inside a fortress of ice!
“That’s right!” Caul said brightly. “She’s absolutely right, they can’t get in. So there’s a quick and painless way to do this, where you melt the ice voluntarily right now, or there’s the long, stubborn, slow, boring, sad way, which is called a siege, where for weeks and months my men stand guard outside while we stay in here, quietly starving to death. Maybe you’ll give up when you’re desperate and hungry enough. Or maybe you’ll start cannibalizing one another. Either way, if my men have to wait that long, they’ll torture every last one of you to death when they get in, which inevitably they will. And if we must go the slow, boring, sad route, then please, for the sake of the children, bring me some trousers.”