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

have us there before the morning’s first train. I got up, stumbled to a bucket of water, splashed some on my face, brushed my teeth with my finger. Oh, how I missed my toothbrush. How I longed for my minty floss, my ocean- breeze-scented deodorant stick. What I wouldn’t have given, just then, to find a Smart Aid store.

My kingdom for a pack of fresh underwear!

As I raked bits of hay from my hair with my fingers and bit into a loaf of inedible bread, the Gypsies and their children watched us with mournful faces. It was as if they knew, somehow, that the previous night’s fun had been a last hurrah, and now we were being led off to the gallows. I tried to cheer one of them up. “It’s okay,” I said to a towheaded little boy who seemed on the verge of tears. “We’re going to be fine.”

He looked at me as if I were a talking ghost, his eyes wide and uncertain.

Eight horses were rounded up, and eight Gypsy riders—one for each of us. Horses would get us to town much faster than a caravan of wagons could. They were also terrifying to me.

I’d never ridden a horse. I was probably the only marginally rich kid in America who hadn’t. It wasn’t because I didn’t think horses were beautiful, majestic creatures, the pinnacle of animal creation, etc., etc.—it’s just that I didn’t believe any animal had the slightest interest in being mounted or ridden by a human being. Besides, horses were very large, with rippling muscles and big, grinding teeth, and they looked at me as if they knew I was afraid and were hoping for an opportunity to kick my head in. Not to mention the lack of a seatbelt on a horse—no secondary restraint systems of any kind—and yet horses could go nearly as fast as cars but were much bouncier. So the whole endeavor just seemed inadvisable.

I said none of this, of course. I shut up and set my jaw and hoped I’d live at least long enough to die in a more interesting way than by falling off a horse.

From the first giddyap! we were at full gallop. I abandoned my dignity right away and bear-hugged the Gypsy man on the saddle in front of me who held the reins—so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to wave goodbye to the Gypsies who had gathered to see us off. Which was just as well: goodbyes had never been my strong suit anyway, and lately my life had felt like an unbroken series of them. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

We rode. My thighs went numb from squeezing the horse. Bekhir led the pack, his peculiar boy riding with him in the saddle. The boy rode with his back straight and arms at his sides, confident and unafraid, such a contrast from last night. He was in his element here, among the Gypsies. He didn’t need us. These were his people.

Eventually we slowed to a trot and I found the courage to un-bury my face from the rider’s jacket and take in the changing landscape. The forest had flattened into fields. We were descending into a valley, in the middle of which was a town that, from here, looked no bigger than a postage stamp, overwhelmed by green on all sides. Tracing toward it from the north was a long ellipsis of puffy white dots: the smoky breath of a train.

Bekhir stopped the horses just shy of the town gates. “This is as far as we go,” he said. “We’re not much welcome in towns. You don’t want the sort of attention we’d draw.”