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

“We keep looking,” said Emma.

“And if we don’t find Miss Wren?” said Enoch.

“We keep looking,” Emma said through her teeth. “Everyone understand?”

Everyone understood perfectly well. We were out of options. If this didn’t work—if Miss Wren wasn’t here or we couldn’t find her soon—then all our efforts would have been for nothing, and Miss Peregrine would be lost just the same as if we’d never come to London at all.

We walked out of the sideshow the way we’d come, dejected, past the now-empty stages, past the plain- looking boy, out of the tent and into the daylight. We were standing outside the exit, unsure what to do next, when the plain-looking boy leaned out through the flap. “Wotsa trouble?” he said. “Show weren’t to your liking?”

“It was … fine,” I said, waving him off.

“Not peculiar enough for you?” he asked.

That got our attention. “What’d you say?” said Emma.

“Wakeling and Rookery,” he said, pointing past us toward the far side of the square. “That’s where the real show is.” And then he winked at us and ducked back inside the tent.

“That was mysterious,” said Hugh.

“Did he say peculiar?” said Bronwyn.

“What’s Wakeling and Rookery?” I said.

“A place,” said Horace. “Someplace in this loop, maybe.”

“Could be the intersection of two streets,” said Emma, and she pulled back the tent flap to ask the boy if this was what he meant—but he was already gone.

So we set off through the crowd, toward the far end of the square where he’d pointed, our one last, thin hope pinned to a couple of oddly named streets we weren’t even sure existed.

*   *   *

There was a point, a few blocks beyond the square, where the noise of the crowd faded and was replaced by an industrial clank and clamor, and the rich funk of roasting meat and animal waste was replaced by a stench far worse and unnameable. Crossing a walled river of Stygian sludge, we entered a district of factories and workhouses, of smokestacks belching black stuff into the sky, and this is where we found Wakeling Street. We walked one way down Wakeling looking for Rookery until it dead-ended at a large open sewer which Enoch said was the River Fleet, then turned and came back the other way. When we’d passed the point along Wakeling where we’d started, the street began to curve and twist, the factories and workhouses shrinking down into squat offices and unassuming buildings with blank faces and no signs, like a neighborhood purpose-built to be anonymous.

The bad feeling I’d been nursing got worse. What if we’d been set up—sent to this deserted part of the city to