mouth, tested the sooty air, then dove back from whence it came.
No one’s gaze lingered on the boy with dark-ringed eyes, or saw the clay man who peeked from his shirt pocket only to be pushed down again by the boy’s finger. Likewise the boy who was dressed to the nines in a muddy but finely tailored suit and stove-in top hat, his face drawn and haggard from lack of sleep, for he hadn’t allowed himself any in days, so afraid was he of his dreams.
No one more than glanced at the big girl in the coat and simple dress, who was built like a stack of bricks and had lashed to her back a steamer trunk nearly as large as herself. None who saw her could have guessed how stupendously heavy the trunk was, or what it held, or why a screen of tiny holes had been punched into one side. Overlooked completely was the young man next to her, so wrapped in scarves and a hooded coat that not an inch of his bare skin could be seen, though it was early September and the weather still warm.
Then there was the American boy, so ordinary-looking he hardly merited notice; so apparently normal that people’s eyes skipped over him—even as he studied them, on tiptoe, neck swiveling, his gaze sweeping across the platform like a sentry’s. The girl by his side stood with her hands clasped together, concealing a tendril of flame that curled stubbornly around the nail of her pinky, which happened sometimes when she was upset. She tried shaking her finger as one might to extinguish a match, then blowing on it. When that didn’t work, she slipped it into her mouth and let a puff of smoke coil from her nose. No one saw that, either.
In fact, no one looked closely enough at the children from the first-class car of the eight-thirty train to notice anything peculiar about them at all. Which was just as well.
Emma nudged me.
“So?”
“I need another minute,” I said.
Bronwyn had set down her trunk and I was standing on it now, head above the crowd, casting my eyes over a shifting sea of faces. The long platform teemed with children. They squirmed like amoebas under a microscope, row upon row receding into a haze of smoke. Hissing black trains loomed up on either side, anxious to swallow them.
I could feel my friends’ eyes on my back, watching me as I scanned the crowd. I was supposed to know whether, somewhere in that great, seething mass, there were monsters who meant to kill us—and I was supposed to know it simply by looking; by assessing some vague feeling in my gut. Usually it was painful and obvious when a hollow was nearby, but in a giant space like this—among hundreds of people—my warning might only be a whisper, the faintest twinge, easy to miss.
“Do the wights know we’re coming?” Bronwyn asked, talking low for fear she’d be overheard by a normal—or worse yet, a wight. They had ears everywhere in the city, or so we’d been led to believe.
“We killed every one of them that might’ve known where we were going,” Hugh said proudly. “Or rather,
