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

We hung back and watched from a distance. People came and went. Someone tried the door but it was frozen shut. The crowd thinned a bit.

“Tick, tick, tick,” said Enoch. “We’re wasting time.”

We cut through what was left of the crowd and stepped onto the icy sidewalk. The building emanated cold, and we shivered and jammed our hands into our pockets against it. Bronwyn used her strength to pull open the door, and it came straight off, hinges flying—but the hallway it let onto was completely obstructed by ice. It stretched from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and into the building in a blue and cloudy blur. The same was true of the windows: I wiped the frost from one pane and then another, and through both I could see only ice. It was as if a glacier was being born somewhere in the heart of the place, and its frozen tongues were squeezing out wherever there was an opening.

We tried every way we could think of to get inside. We rounded the building looking for a door or window that wasn’t blocked, but every potential entrance was filled with ice. We picked up stones and loose bricks and tried hacking at the ice, but it was almost super-naturally hard—even Bronwyn could dig no more than a few inches into it. Millard scanned the Tales for any mention of the building, but there was nothing, no secrets to be found.

Finally, we decided to take a calculated risk. We formed a semicircle around Emma to block her from view, and she heated her hands and placed them against the ice wall that filled the hallway. After a minute they began to sink into the ice, meltwater trickling down to puddle around our feet. But the progress was painfully slow, and after five minutes she’d only gotten up to her elbows.

“At this rate, it’ll take the rest of the week just to get down the hall,” she said, pulling her arms from the ice.

“Do you think Miss Wren could really be inside?” said Bronwyn.

“She has to be,” Emma said firmly.

“I find this contagion of optimism positively flabbergasting,” said Enoch. “If Miss Wren is in there, then she’s frozen solid.”

Emma erupted at him. “Doom and gloom! Ruin and ruination! I think you’d be happy if the world came to an end tomorrow, just so you could say I told you so!”

Enoch blinked at her, surprised, then said very calmly, “You may choose to live in a world of fantasy if you like, my dear, but I am a realist.”

“If you ever offered more than simple criticism,” Emma said, “if you ever gave a single useful suggestion during a crisis, rather than just shrugging your shoulders at the prospect of failure and death, I might be able to tolerate your unrelenting black moods! But as it stands—”

“We’ve tried everything!” Enoch interjected. “What could I possibly suggest?”

“There’s one thing we haven’t tried,” Olive said, piping up from the edge of our group.