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

world of trouble. I say this for your sake, out of genuine concern for your well-being.”

“Yeah, right,” said Emma. “Where was your concern when you were stealing those peculiars’ souls?”

“Ah, yes. Our three pioneers. Their sacrifice was necessary—all for the sake of progress, my dears. What we’re trying to do is advance the peculiar species, you see.”

“What a joke,” she said. “You’re nothing but power-hungry sadists!”

“I know you’re all quite sheltered and uneducated,” said Caul, “but did your ymbrynes not teach you about our people’s history? We peculiars used to be like gods roaming the earth! Giants—kings—the world’s rightful rulers! But over the centuries and millennia, we’ve suffered a terrible decline. We mixed with normals to such an extent that the purity of our peculiar blood has been diluted almost to nothing. And now look at us, how degraded we’ve become! We hide in these temporal backwaters, afraid of the very people we should be ruling, arrested in a state of perpetual childhood by this confederacy of busybodies—these women! Don’t you see how they’ve reduced us? Are you not ashamed? Do you have any idea of the power that’s rightfully ours? Don’t you feel the blood of giants in your veins?” He was losing his cool now, going red in the face. “We aren’t trying to eradicate peculiardom—we’re trying to save it!”

“Is that right?” said the clown, and then walked over to Caul and spat right in his face. “Well, you’ve got a twisted way of going at it.”

Caul wiped the spit away with the back of his hand. “I knew it would be pointless to reason with you. The ymbrynes have been feeding you lies and propaganda for a hundred years. Better, I think, to take your souls and start again fresh.”

Miss Wren returned. “He speaks the truth,” she said. “There must be fifty soldiers out there. All of them armed.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” moaned Bronwyn, “what are we to do?”

“Give up,” said Caul. “Go quietly.”

“It doesn’t matter how many of them there are,” Althea said.

“They’ll never be able to get through all my ice.”

The ice! I’d nearly forgotten. We were inside a fortress of ice!

“That’s right!” Caul said brightly. “She’s absolutely right, they can’t get in. So there’s a quick and painless way to do this, where you melt the ice voluntarily right now, or there’s the long, stubborn, slow, boring, sad way, which is called a siege, where for weeks and months my men stand guard outside while we stay in here, quietly starving to death. Maybe you’ll give up when you’re desperate and hungry enough. Or maybe you’ll start cannibalizing one another. Either way, if my men have to wait that long, they’ll torture every last one of you to death when they get in, which inevitably they will. And if we must go the slow, boring, sad route, then please, for the sake of the children, bring me some trousers.”

“Althea, fetch the man some damned trousers!” said Miss Wren. “But do not, under any circumstances, melt this ice!”