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

pulled Melina behind it just as the bomb exploded. That left only the two normal girls unaccounted for. But as the dust settled and their house came into view—or what was left of it—any hope of finding them alive seemed to fade. The upper floor had collapsed, pancaking down onto the lower. What remained was a skeletal wreck of exposed beams and smoking rubble.

Bronwyn took off running toward it anyway, shouting the sisters’ names. Numbly, I watched her go.

“We could’ve helped them and we didn’t,” Emma said miserably. “We left them to die.”

“It wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference,” Millard said. “Their deaths had been written into history. Even if we’d saved their lives today, something else would’ve taken them tomorrow. Another bomb. A bus crash. They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere.”

“Which is why you can’t go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening,” said Enoch. “History heals itself. Isn’t that interesting?”

“No,” Emma snapped, “and you’re a heartless bastard for talking about killing babies at a time like this. Or ever.”

“Baby Hitler,” said Enoch. “And talking loop theory is better than going into pointless hysterics.” He was looking at Bronwyn, who was climbing the rubble, digging in the wreckage, flinging debris this way and that.

She turned and waved her arms at us. “Over here!” she cried.

Enoch shook his head. “Someone please retrieve her. We’ve got an ymbryne to find.”

“Over here!” Bronwyn shouted, louder this time. “I can hear one of them!”

Emma looked at me. “Wait. What did she say?”

And then we were all running to meet her.

*   *   *

We found the little girl beneath a slab of broken ceiling. It had fallen across the bathtub, which was wrecked but had not entirely collapsed. Cowering inside was Esme—wet, filthy, and traumatized—but alive. The tub had protected her, just like her sister promised it would.

Bronwyn lifted the slab enough for Emma to reach in and pull Esme out. She clung to Emma, trembling and weeping. “Where’s my sister?” she said. “Where’s Sam?”

“Hush, baby, hush,” Emma said, rocking her back and forth.

“We’re going to get you to a hospital. Sam will be along later.” That was a lie, of course, and I could see Emma’s heart breaking as she told it. That we had survived and the little girl had also were two miracles in one night. To expect a third seemed greedy.

But then a third miracle did happen, or something like one: her sister answered.