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

“I’m here, Esme!” came a voice from above.

“Sam!” the little girl shouted, and we all looked up.

Sam was dangling from a wooden beam in the rafters. The beam was broken and hung down at a forty-five- degree angle. Sam was near the low end, but still too high for any of us to reach.

“Let go!” Emma said. “We’ll catch you!”

“I can’t!”

Then I looked more closely and saw why she couldn’t, and I nearly fainted.

Sam’s arms and legs were dangling free. She wasn’t hanging onto the beam, but from it. She’d been impaled through the center of her body. And yet her eyes were open, and she was blinking alertly in our direction.

“I appear to be stuck,” she said calmly.

I was sure Sam would die at any moment. She was in shock, so she felt no pain, but pretty soon the adrenaline pumping through her system would dissipate, and she’d fade, and be gone.

“Someone get my sister down!” Esme cried.

Bronwyn went after her. She climbed a crumbling staircase to the ruined ceiling, then reached out to grab onto the beam. She pulled and pulled, and with her great strength was able to angle the beam downward until the broken end was nearly touching the rubble below. This allowed Enoch and Hugh to reach Sam’s dangling legs and, very gently, slide her forward until she came free with a soft ploop! and landed on her feet.

Sam regarded the hole in her chest dully. It was nearly six inches in diameter and perfectly round, like the beam she’d been impaled on, and yet it didn’t seem to concern her much.

Esme broke away from Emma and ran to her sister. “Sam!” she cried, throwing her arms around the injured girl’s waist. “Thank Heaven you’re all right!”

“I don’t think she is!” Olive said. “I don’t think she is at all!”

But Sam worried only for Esme, not for herself. Once she’d hugged the stuffing out of her, Sam knelt down and held the little girl at arm’s length, scanning for cuts and bruises. “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.

“My ears are ringy. I scraped my knees. And I got some dirt in my eye …”

Then Esme began to tremble and cry, the shock of what had happened overcoming her again. Sam hugged her close, saying, “There, there …”

It made no sense that Sam’s body was functioning in any capacity. Stranger still, her wound wasn’t even bleeding, and there was no gore or little bits of entrails hanging out of it, like I knew to expect from horror movies.