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

carpet of green treetops spreading beyond it. “Hug the wall!” Emma warned. “It’s a long way down.”

Just glancing at the drop-off made me dizzy. Suddenly, it seemed, I had developed a new and stomach- clenching fear of heights, and it took all my concentration simply to put one foot in front of the other.

Emma touched my arm. “Are you all right?” she whispered. “You look pale.”

I lied and said I was, and succeeded in faking allrightness for exactly three more twists in the path, at which point my heart was racing and my legs shaking so badly that I had to sit down, right there in the middle of the narrow path, blocking everyone behind me.

“Oh, dear,” Hugh muttered. “Jacob’s cracking up.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I muttered. I’d never been afraid of heights before, but now I couldn’t so much as look off the edge of the path without my stomach doing flips.

Then something terrible occurred to me: what if this wasn’t a fear of heights I was feeling—but of hollows?

It couldn’t be, though: we were inside a loop, where hollows couldn’t go. And yet the more I studied the feeling churning in my gut, the more convinced I became that it wasn’t the drop itself that bothered me, but something beyond it.

I had to see for myself.

Everyone chattered anxiously in my ear, asking what was the matter, was I okay. I shut out their voices, tipped forward onto my hands, and crawled toward the edge of path. The closer I got, the worse my stomach felt, like it was being clawed to shreds from the inside. Inches away, I pressed my chest flat to the ground and reached out to hook my fingers over the ledge, then dragged myself forward until I could peek over it.

It took my eyes a moment to spot the hollow. At first it was just a shimmer against the craggy mountainside; a quivering spot in the air like heat waves rising from a hot car. An error, barely detectable.

This was how they looked to normals, and to other peculiars—to anyone who could not do what I did.

Then I actually experienced my peculiar ability coming to life. Very quickly, the churning in my belly contracted and focused into a single point of pain; and then, in a way I can’t fully explain, it became directional, lengthening from a point into a line, from one dimension to two. The line, like a compass needle, pointed diagonally at that faltering spot a hundred yards below and to the left on the mountainside, the waves and shimmers of which began to gather and coalesce into solid black mass, a humanoid thing made from tentacles and shadow, clinging to the rocks.

And then it saw me see it and its whole awful body drew taut. Hunkering close against the rocks, it unhinged its saw-toothed mouth and let loose an ear-splitting shriek.

My friends didn’t need me to describe what I was seeing. The sound alone was enough.

“Hollow!” someone shouted.