I nodded.
“Sharon’s Panloopticon toadies tracked you to New York, and Addison’s nose was able to track you to that market,” said Hugh. “But that’s as far as he would go.”
Bless that little dog, I thought. I was losing count of how many times he’d risked his life for us.
“You were easy to find from there,” said Bronwyn. “We followed the shouting.”
“Did Miss Peregrine send you?” I said.
“No,” said Hugh. “She doesn’t know about this.”
“She probably does by now,” said Bronwyn. “She’s awfully good at knowing things.”
“We thought more than two of us leaving might attract too much attention.”
“We all drew straws,” said Bronwyn. “Hugh and me won.” She glanced at Hugh. “Think Miss P will be mad at us for coming?”
Hugh nodded vigorously. “Steaming. But proud, too. Assuming we can get him back home in one piece.”
“Home?” Noor said. “Where’s that?”
“A loop in late-1800s London called Devil’s Acre,” Hugh said. “Closest thing we got to a home, anyhow.”
Noor’s eyebrows furrowed. “Sounds . . . delightful.”
“It’s rough around the edges, but it has a certain charm. It’s better than living out of a suitcase, at any rate.”
Noor looked a bit doubtful. “And it’s a place for people like you?”
“For people like us,” I said.
She didn’t react, or tried not to, but I saw a flicker of something behind her eyes. An idea, perhaps, that was starting to register. Us.
“You’ll be safe there,” said Bronwyn. “No men with guns chasing you . . . no helicopters . . .”
I was about to agree, but then I remembered H’s warning about the ymbrynes, and the things Miss Peregrine had said to me in the last conversation we’d had, about certain sacrifices being necessary for the greater good. One of those sacrifices being Noor herself.
“What about all the things H told us we need to do?” Noor said to me.
She had lowered her voice a bit, unsure of whether Bronwyn and Hugh knew, or should know, about this.
“All what things?” Hugh asked.
I said, “Before he died, H gave me some information about Noor and the people who’ve been chasing her, and he said we needed to find a woman named V. That there were important things about this that only she knew.”
“V? Isn’t that the hollow-slayer your grandfather trained?” asked Bronwyn.
Bronwyn had been at the diviners’ loop when V’s name had first come up. Of course she remembered.
“The same,” I said. “And H—well, his hollowgast—showed us a map and gave us some instructions on how to find her—”
“His hollowgast?” gasped Bronwyn.
I pulled the paper map fragment out of my pocket and showed them. “He wasn’t a hollowgast anymore. He was turning into something else.”
“You mean a wight?” said Hugh. “That’s the only thing hollows turn into.”
Noor gave me a confused look. “You said the wights are our enemies.”
“They are,” I said. “But H was friends with this particular hollow . . .”
“This is getting more and more surreal,” Noor said.
“I know. And that’s why I think we should go with them to Devil’s Acre,” I said. “We need help, and all the peculiars I know and trust are there.”
Whether or not they would ever trust me again, or would be willing to help after what I’d put them through, was another matter. But I had to try. I needed my friends, H’s warning be damned.
If Miss Peregrine was really capable of sending the girl we had just helped rescue back into the hands of her captors for some political reason—or any reason—then she wasn’t the Miss Peregrine I thought I knew. And if I couldn’t keep Noor from harm in a loop full of friends, how was I supposed to help her navigate the wilderness of peculiar America?
“Millard’s a cartography expert,” said Bronwyn.
“And Horace is a prophet,” I added. “Part-time, at least.”
“Yeah,” Noor said, her eyes sliding to me. “You never finished telling me about that.”
The prophecy. I wanted to tell her in private, not in front of other people. It seemed we were no longer in immediate danger.
“It can wait,” I said.
Hugh and Bronwyn both gave me curious looks.
“If you say so,” Noor said, but she was starting to sound impatient.
The train began to stop. We were at the next station.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
We ran up out of the subway and back onto daylit streets. Noor took a moment to help Bronwyn get oriented.
“It’s not far now,” Bronwyn promised, guiding us diagonally through four lanes of traffic as horns blared.
We cut through a basketball court with a game in progress, through a sad green space overwhelmed by a looming pair of old condo towers. With each block the neighborhood was getting worse, rusty and chewed-up, until finally we were in the shadow of a huge brick building covered in scaffolding and ringed by chain-link fences skinned with green tarps. Bronwyn stopped and pulled a tarp back, revealing a hole in the fence. Noor and I traded a quick, hesitant glance.
Bronwyn and Hugh waved at us to follow and then disappeared through the hole.
Hugh popped his head back out. “You two coming?”
Noor squeezed her eyes shut for a second—no doubt fighting some version of What the hell am I doing? in her head—then climbed through. Though she might not have believed me, I often fought that same battle. A voice inside me had been shouting What the hell are you doing? more or less daily since I’d gone to Wales on a hunch to chase down ghosts from old photos. I’d gotten better at tuning it out, and it had gotten a lot quieter. But it was still there.
On the other side of the fence was a different world—or a much sadder and grimmer one, at any rate. Stepping through was like peeling back a corpse’s shroud. The building had been built and finished long ago, then left to ruin. I stood in the wild grass and allowed myself one long breath to take it in—ten stories tall and wide as a city block, leaded windows all broken, bricks scabbed and veined with dead vines. Grand steps led up to a doorway framed in fancy wrought-iron curlicues. Above it, carved into a heavy marble slab, were the words PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL.