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

Enoch does! And as for our ymbryne, I’m sure she didn’t mean to do what she did!”

Sam spun to face her. “That was no accident! I’m glad my sister’s not like all of you. Wish to God I wasn’t.”

She turned away again, and this time Emma didn’t follow. With wounded eyes she watched Sam go, then slouched after the others. Somehow the olive branch she’d extended had turned into a snake and bitten her.

Bronwyn peeled off her sweater and set it down on the rubble. “Next time bombs start falling, have your sister wear this,” she called to Sam. “It’ll keep her safer than any bathtub.”

Sam said nothing; didn’t even look. She was bending over the ambulance driver, who was sitting up now and mumbling, “I had the queerest dream …”

“That was a stupid thing to do,” Enoch said to Bronwyn.

“Now you don’t have a sweater.”

“Shut your fat gob,” Bronwyn replied. “If you’d ever done a nice thing for another person, you might understand.”

“I did do something nice for another person,” Enoch said, “and it nearly got us eaten by hollows!”

We mumbled goodbyes that went unreturned and slipped quietly into the shadows. Melina took the pigeon from her shoulder and tossed it skyward. It flew a short distance before a string she’d tied around its foot snapped taut and it hovered, caught in the air, like a dog straining at its lead. “Miss Wren’s this way,” Melina said, nodding in the direction the bird was pulling, and we followed the girl and her pigeon friend down the alley.

I was about to assume hollow-watch, my now-customary position near the head of the group, when something made me glance back at the sisters. I turned in time to see Sam lift Esme into the ambulance, then bend forward to plant a kiss on each of her scraped knees. I wondered what would happen to them. Later, Millard would tell me that the fact that none of them had ever heard of Sam—and someone with such a unique peculiarity would’ve been well known—meant she probably had not survived the war.

The whole episode had really gotten to Emma. I don’t know why it was so important for her to prove to a stranger that we were good-hearted, when we knew ourselves to be—but the suggestion that we were anything less than angels walking the earth, that our natures were more complexly shaded, seemed to bother her. “They don’t understand,” she kept saying.

Then again, I thought, maybe they do.

So it had come to this: everything depended on a pigeon. Whether we would end the night in the womblike safety of an ymbryne’s care or half chewed in the churning black of a hollow’s guts; whether Miss Peregrine would be saved or we’d wander lost through this hellscape until her clock ran out; whether I would live to see my home or my parents again—it all depended on one scrawny, peculiar pigeon.