“Oh, I’ll unhand you,” said Bronwyn, and then she picked him up, stuffed him headfirst into the booth, and barred the door shut with his umbrella. The man screamed and banged on the glass, jumping up and down like a fat fly trapped in a bottle. Although it would’ve been fun to stick around and laugh at him, the man had drawn too much attention, and now adults were converging on us from all across the station. It was time to go.
We linked hands and raced off toward the turnstiles, leaving behind us a wake of tripped and flailing normals. A train whistle screeched and was echoed inside Bronwyn’s trunk, where Miss Peregrine was being tossed around like laundry in the wash. Too light on her feet to run, Olive clung to Bronwyn’s neck, trailing behind her like a half-deflated balloon on a string.
Some of the adults were closer to the exit than we were, and rather than running around them, we tried to barrel straight through.
This didn’t work.
The first to intercept us was a big woman who smacked Enoch upside the head with her purse, then tackled him. When Emma tried to pull her off, two men grabbed her by the arms and wrestled her to the floor. I was about to jump in and help her when a third man grabbed my arms.
“Someone do something!” Brownyn cried. We all knew what she meant, but it wasn’t clear which of us was free to act. Then a bee whizzed past Enoch’s nose and buried its stinger in the haunches of the woman sitting astride him, and she squealed and leapt up.
“Yes!” Enoch shouted. “More bees!”
“They’re tired!” Hugh shouted back. “They only just got to sleep after saving you the last time!” But he could see that there was no other way—Emma’s arms were pinned, Bronwyn was busy protecting both her trunk and Olive from a trio of angry train conductors, and there were more adults on the way—so Hugh began pounding his chest as if trying to dislodge a piece of stuck food. A moment later he let out a reverberating belch, and ten or so bees flew out of his mouth. They did a few circles overhead, then got their bearings and began stinging every adult in sight.
The men holding Emma dropped her and fled. The one holding me got stung right on the tip of his nose, and he hollered and flapped his arms as if possessed by demons. Soon all the adults were running, trying to defend themselves from tiny, stinging attackers with spastic dance moves, to the delight of all the children still on the platform, who laughed and cheered and threw their arms in the air in imitation of their ridiculous elders.
With everyone thus distracted, we picked ourselves up, bolted for the turnstiles, and ran out into a bustling London afternoon.
* * *
We became lost in the chaos of the streets. It felt like we’d been plunged into a jar of stirred liquid, racing with particles: gentlemen, ladies, laborers, soldiers, street kids, and beggars all rushing purposefully in every direction, weaving around tiny, sputtering cars and cart vendors crying their wares and buskers blowing horns and buses blowing horns and shuddering to stops to spill more people onto the teeming sidewalks. Containing all this was a canyon of column-fronted buildings that stretched to vanishing down a street half in shadow, the afternoon sun low and muted, reduced by the smokes of London to a murky glow, a lantern winking through fog.
Dizzy from it, I half closed my eyes and let Emma pull me along while with my free hand I reached into my pocket to touch the cold glass of my phone. I found this strangely calming. My phone was a useless relic of the future but an object which retained some power nevertheless—that of a long, thin filament connecting this baffling world to the sane and recognizable one I’d once belonged to; a thing that said to me as I touched it, You are here and this is real and you are not dreaming and you are still you, and somehow that made everything around me vibrate a little less quickly.
Enoch had spent his formative years in London and claimed to still know its streets, so he led. We stuck mostly to alleys and back lanes, which made the city seem at first like a maze of gray walls and gutter pipes, its grandness revealed in glimpses as we dashed across wide boulevards and back to the safety of shadows. We made a game of it, laughing, racing one another between alleys. Horace pretended to trip over a curb, then bounced up nimbly and bowed like a dancer, tipping his hat. We laughed like mad, strangely giddy, half in disbelief that we’d made it this far—across the water, through the woods, past snarling hollows and death squads of wights, all the way to London.
We put a good long way between us and the train station and then stopped in an alley by some trash cans to catch our breath. Bronwyn set down her trunk and lifted Miss Peregrine out, and she wobbled drunkenly across the cobblestones. Horace and Millard broke out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” said Bronwyn. “It ain’t Miss P’s fault she’s dizzy.”
Horace swept his arms out grandly. “Welcome to beautiful London!” he said. “It’s ever so much grander than you described it, Enoch. And oh, did you describe it! For seventy-five years: London, London, London! The greatest city on Earth!”
Millard picked up a trash-can lid. “London! The finest refuse available anywhere!”
Horace doffed his hat. “London! Where even the rats wear top hats!”
“Oh, I didn’t go on about it that much,” Enoch said.
“You did!” said Olive. “ ‘Well, that’s not how they do things in London,’ you’d say. Or, ‘In London, the food is much finer!’ ”
“Obviously, we’re not on a grand tour of the city right now!” Enoch said defensively. “Would you rather walk through alleys or be spotted by wights?”
Horace ignored him. “London: where every day’s a holiday … for the trash man!”
He broke down laughing, and his laughter was infectious. Soon nearly all of us were giggling—even Enoch. “I suppose I did glamorize it a bit,” he admitted.
“I don’t see what’s so amusing about London,” Olive said with a frown. “It’s dirty and smelly and full of cruel, nasty people who make children cry and I hate it!” She scrunched her face into a scowl and added, “And I’m becoming quite peckish!”—which made us all laugh harder.
“Those people in the station were nasty,” said Millard. “But they got what they deserved! I’ll never forget that man’s face when Bronwyn stuffed him into the phone box.”
“Or that horrible woman when she got stung in the bum by a bee!” said Enoch. “I’d pay money to see that again.”
I glanced at Hugh, expecting him to chime in, but his back was to us, his shoulders trembling.
“Hugh?” I said. “You all right?”
He shied away. “No one gives a whit,” he said. “Don’t bother checking on old Hugh, he’s just here to save everyone’s hindquarters with no word of thanks from anybody!”
Shamed, we offered him our thanks and apologies.
“Sorry, Hugh.”
“Thanks again, Hugh.”
“You’re our man in a pinch, Hugh.”
He turned to face us. “They were my friends, you know.”
“We still are!” said Olive.
“Not you—my bees! They can only sting once, and then it’s lights out, the big hive in the sky. And now I’ve only Henry left, and he can’t fly ’cause he’s missing a wing.” He put out his hand and slowly opened the fingers, and there in his palm was Henry, waving his only wing at us.
“C’mon, mate,” Hugh whispered to it. “Time to go home.” He stuck out his tongue, set the bee upon it, and closed his mouth.
Enoch patted him on the shoulder. “I’d bring them back to life for you, but I’m not sure it would work on creatures so small.”
“Thanks anyway,” Hugh said, and then he cleared his throat and wiped his cheeks roughly, as if annoyed at his tears for exposing him.
“We’ll find you more just as soon as we get Miss P fixed up,” said Bronwyn.
“Speaking of which,” Enoch said to Emma, “did you manage to get through to any ymbrynes on that phone?”
“Not a one,” Emma replied, then sat down on an overturned trash can, her shoulders slumping. “I was really hoping we might catch a bit of good luck for once. But no.”
“Then it seems the dog was correct,” said Horace. “The great loops of London have fallen to our enemies.” He bowed his head solemnly. “The worst has come to pass. All our ymbrynes have been kidnapped.”
We all bowed our heads, our giddy mood gone.
“In that case,” said Enoch, “Millard, you’d better tell us all you know about the punishment loops. If that’s where the ymbrynes are, we’re going to have to stage a rescue.”
“No,” said Millard. “No, no, no.”
“What do you mean, no?” said Emma.
Millard made a strangled noise in his throat and started breathing weirdly. “I mean … we can’t …”
He couldn’t seem to get the words out.
“What’s wrong with him?” said Bronwyn. “Mill, what’s the matter?”
“You’d better explain right now what you mean by ‘no,’ ” Emma said threateningly.
“Because we’ll die, that’s why!” Millard said, his voice breaking.
“But back at the menagerie you made it sound so easy!” I said.
“Like we could just waltz into a punishment loop …”
Millard was hyperventilating, hysterical—and it scared me. Bronwyn found a crumpled paper bag and told him to breathe into it. When he’d recovered a bit, he answered.
“Getting into one is easy enough,” he said, speaking slowly, working to control his breaths. “Getting out again is trickier. Getting out alive, I should say. Punishment loops are everything the dog said and worse. Rivers of fire … bloodthirsty Vikings … pestilence so thick you can’t breathe … and mixed into all that, like some devilish bouillabaisse, bird knows how many wights and hollowgast!”
“Well, that’s fantastic!” said Horace, tossing up his hands.
“You might’ve told us earlier, you know—like back at the menagerie, when we were planning all this!”
“Would it have made any difference, Horace?” He took a few more breaths from the bag. “If I’d made it sound more frightening, would you have chosen to simply let Miss Peregrine’s humanity expire?”
“Of course not,” said Horace. “But you should’ve told us the truth.”
Millard let the bag drop. His strength was returning, and his conviction with it. “I admit I somewhat downplayed the punishment loops’ dangers. But I never thought we’d actually have to go into them! Despite all that irritating dog’s doomsaying about the state of London, I was certain we’d find at least one unraided loop here, its ymbryne still present and accounted for. And for all we know, we may still! How can we be sure they’ve all been kidnapped? Have we seen their raided loops with our own eyes? What if the ymbrynes’ phones were simply … disconnected?”
“All of them?” Enoch scoffed.
Even Olive, eternally optimistic Olive, shook her head at that.
“Then what do you suggest, Millard?” said Emma. “That we tour London’s loops and hope to find someone still at home? And what would you say the odds are that the corrupted, who are looking for us, would leave all those loops unguarded?”
“I think we’d have a better chance of surviving the night if we spent it playing Russian roulette,” said Enoch.
“All I mean,” Millard said, “is that we have no proof …”
“What more proof do you want?” said Emma. “Pools of blood? A pile of plucked ymbryne feathers? Miss Avocet told us the corrupted assault began here weeks ago. Miss Wren clearly believed that all of London’s ymbrynes had been kidnapped—do you know better than Miss Wren, an ymbryne herself? And now we’re here, and none of the loops are answering their telephones. So please, tell me why going loop to loop would be anything other than a suicidally dangerous waste of time.”
“Wait a minute—that’s it!” Millard exclaimed. “What about Miss Wren?”
“What about her?” said Emma.
“Don’t you remember what the dog told us? Miss Wren came to London a few days ago, when she heard that her sister ymbrynes had been kidnapped.”
“So?”
“What if she’s still here?”
“Then she’s probably been captured by now!” said Enoch.
“And if she hasn’t?” Millard’s voice was bright with hope.
“She could help Miss Peregrine—and then we wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the punishment loops!”
“And how would you suggest we find her?” Enoch said shrilly.
“Shout her name from the rooftops? This isn’t Cairnholm; it’s a city of millions!”
“Her pigeons,” said Millard.
“Come again?”
“It was Miss Wren’s peculiar pigeons who told her where the ymbrynes had been taken. If they knew where all the other ymbrynes went, then they should know where Miss Wren is, too. They belong to her, after all.”
“Hah!” said Enoch. “The only thing commoner here than plain-looking middle-aged ladies are flocks of pigeons. And you want to search all of London for one flock in particular?”
“It does seem a bit mad,” Emma said. “Sorry, Mill, I just don’t see how that could work.”
“Then it’s a lucky thing for you I spent our train ride studying rather than making idle gossip. Someone hand me the Tales!”
We linked hands and raced off toward the turnstiles, leaving behind us a wake of tripped and flailing normals. A train whistle screeched and was echoed inside Bronwyn’s trunk, where Miss Peregrine was being tossed around like laundry in the wash. Too light on her feet to run, Olive clung to Bronwyn’s neck, trailing behind her like a half-deflated balloon on a string.
Some of the adults were closer to the exit than we were, and rather than running around them, we tried to barrel straight through.
This didn’t work.
The first to intercept us was a big woman who smacked Enoch upside the head with her purse, then tackled him. When Emma tried to pull her off, two men grabbed her by the arms and wrestled her to the floor. I was about to jump in and help her when a third man grabbed my arms.
“Someone do something!” Brownyn cried. We all knew what she meant, but it wasn’t clear which of us was free to act. Then a bee whizzed past Enoch’s nose and buried its stinger in the haunches of the woman sitting astride him, and she squealed and leapt up.
“Yes!” Enoch shouted. “More bees!”
“They’re tired!” Hugh shouted back. “They only just got to sleep after saving you the last time!” But he could see that there was no other way—Emma’s arms were pinned, Bronwyn was busy protecting both her trunk and Olive from a trio of angry train conductors, and there were more adults on the way—so Hugh began pounding his chest as if trying to dislodge a piece of stuck food. A moment later he let out a reverberating belch, and ten or so bees flew out of his mouth. They did a few circles overhead, then got their bearings and began stinging every adult in sight.
The men holding Emma dropped her and fled. The one holding me got stung right on the tip of his nose, and he hollered and flapped his arms as if possessed by demons. Soon all the adults were running, trying to defend themselves from tiny, stinging attackers with spastic dance moves, to the delight of all the children still on the platform, who laughed and cheered and threw their arms in the air in imitation of their ridiculous elders.
With everyone thus distracted, we picked ourselves up, bolted for the turnstiles, and ran out into a bustling London afternoon.
* * *
We became lost in the chaos of the streets. It felt like we’d been plunged into a jar of stirred liquid, racing with particles: gentlemen, ladies, laborers, soldiers, street kids, and beggars all rushing purposefully in every direction, weaving around tiny, sputtering cars and cart vendors crying their wares and buskers blowing horns and buses blowing horns and shuddering to stops to spill more people onto the teeming sidewalks. Containing all this was a canyon of column-fronted buildings that stretched to vanishing down a street half in shadow, the afternoon sun low and muted, reduced by the smokes of London to a murky glow, a lantern winking through fog.
Dizzy from it, I half closed my eyes and let Emma pull me along while with my free hand I reached into my pocket to touch the cold glass of my phone. I found this strangely calming. My phone was a useless relic of the future but an object which retained some power nevertheless—that of a long, thin filament connecting this baffling world to the sane and recognizable one I’d once belonged to; a thing that said to me as I touched it, You are here and this is real and you are not dreaming and you are still you, and somehow that made everything around me vibrate a little less quickly.
Enoch had spent his formative years in London and claimed to still know its streets, so he led. We stuck mostly to alleys and back lanes, which made the city seem at first like a maze of gray walls and gutter pipes, its grandness revealed in glimpses as we dashed across wide boulevards and back to the safety of shadows. We made a game of it, laughing, racing one another between alleys. Horace pretended to trip over a curb, then bounced up nimbly and bowed like a dancer, tipping his hat. We laughed like mad, strangely giddy, half in disbelief that we’d made it this far—across the water, through the woods, past snarling hollows and death squads of wights, all the way to London.
We put a good long way between us and the train station and then stopped in an alley by some trash cans to catch our breath. Bronwyn set down her trunk and lifted Miss Peregrine out, and she wobbled drunkenly across the cobblestones. Horace and Millard broke out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” said Bronwyn. “It ain’t Miss P’s fault she’s dizzy.”
Horace swept his arms out grandly. “Welcome to beautiful London!” he said. “It’s ever so much grander than you described it, Enoch. And oh, did you describe it! For seventy-five years: London, London, London! The greatest city on Earth!”
Millard picked up a trash-can lid. “London! The finest refuse available anywhere!”
Horace doffed his hat. “London! Where even the rats wear top hats!”
“Oh, I didn’t go on about it that much,” Enoch said.
“You did!” said Olive. “ ‘Well, that’s not how they do things in London,’ you’d say. Or, ‘In London, the food is much finer!’ ”
“Obviously, we’re not on a grand tour of the city right now!” Enoch said defensively. “Would you rather walk through alleys or be spotted by wights?”
Horace ignored him. “London: where every day’s a holiday … for the trash man!”
He broke down laughing, and his laughter was infectious. Soon nearly all of us were giggling—even Enoch. “I suppose I did glamorize it a bit,” he admitted.
“I don’t see what’s so amusing about London,” Olive said with a frown. “It’s dirty and smelly and full of cruel, nasty people who make children cry and I hate it!” She scrunched her face into a scowl and added, “And I’m becoming quite peckish!”—which made us all laugh harder.
“Those people in the station were nasty,” said Millard. “But they got what they deserved! I’ll never forget that man’s face when Bronwyn stuffed him into the phone box.”
“Or that horrible woman when she got stung in the bum by a bee!” said Enoch. “I’d pay money to see that again.”
I glanced at Hugh, expecting him to chime in, but his back was to us, his shoulders trembling.
“Hugh?” I said. “You all right?”
He shied away. “No one gives a whit,” he said. “Don’t bother checking on old Hugh, he’s just here to save everyone’s hindquarters with no word of thanks from anybody!”
Shamed, we offered him our thanks and apologies.
“Sorry, Hugh.”
“Thanks again, Hugh.”
“You’re our man in a pinch, Hugh.”
He turned to face us. “They were my friends, you know.”
“We still are!” said Olive.
“Not you—my bees! They can only sting once, and then it’s lights out, the big hive in the sky. And now I’ve only Henry left, and he can’t fly ’cause he’s missing a wing.” He put out his hand and slowly opened the fingers, and there in his palm was Henry, waving his only wing at us.
“C’mon, mate,” Hugh whispered to it. “Time to go home.” He stuck out his tongue, set the bee upon it, and closed his mouth.
Enoch patted him on the shoulder. “I’d bring them back to life for you, but I’m not sure it would work on creatures so small.”
“Thanks anyway,” Hugh said, and then he cleared his throat and wiped his cheeks roughly, as if annoyed at his tears for exposing him.
“We’ll find you more just as soon as we get Miss P fixed up,” said Bronwyn.
“Speaking of which,” Enoch said to Emma, “did you manage to get through to any ymbrynes on that phone?”
“Not a one,” Emma replied, then sat down on an overturned trash can, her shoulders slumping. “I was really hoping we might catch a bit of good luck for once. But no.”
“Then it seems the dog was correct,” said Horace. “The great loops of London have fallen to our enemies.” He bowed his head solemnly. “The worst has come to pass. All our ymbrynes have been kidnapped.”
We all bowed our heads, our giddy mood gone.
“In that case,” said Enoch, “Millard, you’d better tell us all you know about the punishment loops. If that’s where the ymbrynes are, we’re going to have to stage a rescue.”
“No,” said Millard. “No, no, no.”
“What do you mean, no?” said Emma.
Millard made a strangled noise in his throat and started breathing weirdly. “I mean … we can’t …”
He couldn’t seem to get the words out.
“What’s wrong with him?” said Bronwyn. “Mill, what’s the matter?”
“You’d better explain right now what you mean by ‘no,’ ” Emma said threateningly.
“Because we’ll die, that’s why!” Millard said, his voice breaking.
“But back at the menagerie you made it sound so easy!” I said.
“Like we could just waltz into a punishment loop …”
Millard was hyperventilating, hysterical—and it scared me. Bronwyn found a crumpled paper bag and told him to breathe into it. When he’d recovered a bit, he answered.
“Getting into one is easy enough,” he said, speaking slowly, working to control his breaths. “Getting out again is trickier. Getting out alive, I should say. Punishment loops are everything the dog said and worse. Rivers of fire … bloodthirsty Vikings … pestilence so thick you can’t breathe … and mixed into all that, like some devilish bouillabaisse, bird knows how many wights and hollowgast!”
“Well, that’s fantastic!” said Horace, tossing up his hands.
“You might’ve told us earlier, you know—like back at the menagerie, when we were planning all this!”
“Would it have made any difference, Horace?” He took a few more breaths from the bag. “If I’d made it sound more frightening, would you have chosen to simply let Miss Peregrine’s humanity expire?”
“Of course not,” said Horace. “But you should’ve told us the truth.”
Millard let the bag drop. His strength was returning, and his conviction with it. “I admit I somewhat downplayed the punishment loops’ dangers. But I never thought we’d actually have to go into them! Despite all that irritating dog’s doomsaying about the state of London, I was certain we’d find at least one unraided loop here, its ymbryne still present and accounted for. And for all we know, we may still! How can we be sure they’ve all been kidnapped? Have we seen their raided loops with our own eyes? What if the ymbrynes’ phones were simply … disconnected?”
“All of them?” Enoch scoffed.
Even Olive, eternally optimistic Olive, shook her head at that.
“Then what do you suggest, Millard?” said Emma. “That we tour London’s loops and hope to find someone still at home? And what would you say the odds are that the corrupted, who are looking for us, would leave all those loops unguarded?”
“I think we’d have a better chance of surviving the night if we spent it playing Russian roulette,” said Enoch.
“All I mean,” Millard said, “is that we have no proof …”
“What more proof do you want?” said Emma. “Pools of blood? A pile of plucked ymbryne feathers? Miss Avocet told us the corrupted assault began here weeks ago. Miss Wren clearly believed that all of London’s ymbrynes had been kidnapped—do you know better than Miss Wren, an ymbryne herself? And now we’re here, and none of the loops are answering their telephones. So please, tell me why going loop to loop would be anything other than a suicidally dangerous waste of time.”
“Wait a minute—that’s it!” Millard exclaimed. “What about Miss Wren?”
“What about her?” said Emma.
“Don’t you remember what the dog told us? Miss Wren came to London a few days ago, when she heard that her sister ymbrynes had been kidnapped.”
“So?”
“What if she’s still here?”
“Then she’s probably been captured by now!” said Enoch.
“And if she hasn’t?” Millard’s voice was bright with hope.
“She could help Miss Peregrine—and then we wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the punishment loops!”
“And how would you suggest we find her?” Enoch said shrilly.
“Shout her name from the rooftops? This isn’t Cairnholm; it’s a city of millions!”
“Her pigeons,” said Millard.
“Come again?”
“It was Miss Wren’s peculiar pigeons who told her where the ymbrynes had been taken. If they knew where all the other ymbrynes went, then they should know where Miss Wren is, too. They belong to her, after all.”
“Hah!” said Enoch. “The only thing commoner here than plain-looking middle-aged ladies are flocks of pigeons. And you want to search all of London for one flock in particular?”
“It does seem a bit mad,” Emma said. “Sorry, Mill, I just don’t see how that could work.”
“Then it’s a lucky thing for you I spent our train ride studying rather than making idle gossip. Someone hand me the Tales!”
