Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children

“No one’s certain,” Millard answered. “There are legends, though.”

“Like what?”

“Some people believe we’re descended from a handful of peculiars who lived a long, long time ago,” he said. “They were very powerful—and enormous, like the stone giant we found.”

I said, “Why are we so small, then, if we used to be giants?”

“The story goes that over the years, as we multiplied, our power diluted. As we became less powerful, we got smaller, too.”

“That’s all pretty hard to swallow,” I said. “I feel about as powerful as an ant.”

“Ants are quite powerful, actually, relative to their size.”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “The thing I really don’t get is, why me? I never asked to be this way. Who decided?”

It was a rhetorical question; I wasn’t really expecting an answer, but Millard gave me one anyway. “To quote a famous peculiar: ‘At the heart of nature’s mystery lies another mystery.’ ”

“Who said that?”

“We know him as Perplexus Anomalous. An invented name, probably, for a great thinker and philosopher. Perplexus was a cartographer, too. He drew the very first edition of the Map of Days, a thousand-something years ago.”

I chuckled. “You talk like a teacher sometimes. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“All the time,” Millard said. “I would’ve liked to try my hand at teaching. If I hadn’t been born like this.”

“You would’ve been great at it.”

“Thank you,” he said. Then he went quiet, and in the silence I could feel him dreaming it: scenes from a life that might’ve been. After a while he said, “I don’t want you to think that I don’t like being invisible. I do. I love being peculiar, Jacob—it’s the very core of who I am. But there are days I wish I could turn it off.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. But of course I didn’t. My peculiarity had its challenges, but at least I could participate in society.

The door to our compartment slid open. Millard quickly flipped up the hood of his jacket to hide his face—or rather, his apparent lack of one.

A young woman stood in the door. She wore a uniform and held a box of goods for sale. “Cigarettes?” she asked. “Chocolate?”

“No, thanks,” I said.