A hand grabbed my foot. I managed to kick it off. I heard a struggle behind me, and there was a dull thud and one of the men cried out. I glanced back to see one of Leo’s guys falling to the floor, the warthog girl behind him with a hunk of wood held in her hand.
I could hear Noor ahead of me, somewhere, grunting as she army-crawled forward on her elbows, farther and farther into the black. I pushed forward, then began to slide without effort. The tunnel was greased with something, and it angled downward slightly; after a few feet, forward momentum began to take me. It felt something like being born, I imagined, only faster and much longer—then I heard Noor scream. I felt myself being actively pulled through by something—not a hand but a bodiless force that gripped every part of me—like gravity. I felt that quickening in my blood and that lurch in my stomach that I knew so well.
We were crossing over.
We tumbled out of a small closet onto the long, red-carpeted hallway of Bentham’s Panloopticon. Bronwyn was collecting herself when Noor and I arrived, and Hugh was already waiting, looking slightly impatient.
“I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided not to join us!” he said as Bronwyn pulled Noor and I up effortlessly.
“Do you think they’ll come after us?” I said, glancing nervously at the door.
“No chance,” Bronwyn said. “The Untouchables like to get paid.”
I turned to Noor. “How are you?” I said, quiet and close.
“I’m fine,” she said quickly, seeming embarrassed. “Really sorry about my little freak-out back there.” She was talking to the three of us and looking around at the plush hallway. “This place is definitely better than the one we just left.”
Hugh started to say we should be going, but Noor interrupted him. “One more thing I need to say before we go anywhere or meet anyone else.” She looked at us. “Thank you all for helping me. I’m grateful.”
“You’re welcome,” Hugh said, maybe a bit too breezily.
She frowned. “I’m serious.”
“We are, too,” said Bronwyn.
“You can thank us when we get back to the house,” said Hugh. “Come on, or Sharon’s toadies will notice us and start asking questions I imagine we’d rather not answer.”
“Right enough,” Bronwyn said.
We walked quickly down the hall in a tight cluster. This section of the Panloopticon was relatively deserted, but after rounding a few corners, it began to get crowded. Peculiars dressed in outfits spanning every era and style were coming and going from loop doors. A sand drift was collecting outside one door, and a howling wind was spitting rain from another, held open a crack by a brick stuck in the jamb. People were lined up against the walls to have their travel documents checked and stamped by bureaucrats at small standing desks, and the echo of voices and footsteps and papers being shuffled made the place sound like a train station at evening rush hour.
Noor’s eyes were wide and roving, and I could hear Bronwyn, a hand on her back, attempting to explain our surroundings in a low voice.
“Every one of these doors leads to a different loop . . . It’s called the Panloopticon and it was invented by Miss Peregrine’s extremely brilliant brother Bentham . . . then taken over by her extremely evil other brother, and our worst enemy, Caul—”
“It’s actually proved quite useful,” Hugh cut in. “This loop we’re in, Devil’s Acre, used to be a prison for miscreant peculiars . . . then became a lawless place and our enemies, the wights, made their headquarters here—”
“Until Jacob helped us smash them and killed their leader,” Bronwyn said proudly.
At the mention of Caul, goose bumps had spontaneously broken out on my arms. “He’s not exactly dead,” I interjected.
“Fine,” said Hugh, “he’s trapped in a collapsed loop he can never, ever get out of, which is basically the same thing.”
“And now the wights are all dead or locked up in jail,” said Bronwyn. “And because they destroyed or seriously damaged many of our loops, a lot of peculiars had nowhere else to go and were forced to move in here.”
“Temporarily, we hope,” Hugh said. “The ymbrynes are trying to rebuild the loops we lost now.”
Noor was starting to look overwhelmed, so I said, “Maybe we should save the history lecture for later.”
We were passing a long row of windows, and Noor stared out as we walked. It was Devil’s Acre on a supersaturated-yellow afternoon, the kind only intense air pollution can create: the Acre’s crumbling buildings; snaking, green-black Fever Ditch; Smoking Street’s eternal haze; and beyond it, old London, a confusion of spires and gray buildings receding into a cauldron of Industrial Age soot.
“My God,” Noor said, voice just above a whisper.
I was walking next to her.
“This is London. Late nineteenth century. And you’re feeling that thing again, aren’t you?”
“The can’t-be-reals,” she said, slowing long enough to reach through an open window and wipe one finger along the ledge. As we sped up to keep pace with the others, she held it up. Her finger had turned black with soot. “But it is real,” she marveled.
“Yes, it is.”
She angled herself toward me. “Do you ever get used to it?”
“A little more every day.” I thought about it. Tried to remember how hard it had been, even recently, to accept this world as real. “I still have moments where I look around and my head swims. Like I’m in the grip of some . . .”
“Nightmare?”
“I was going to say dream.”
She nodded, a small assent, and I felt a shared recognition flicker between us: of a darkness mutually understood, and of a thin, golden thread of wonder and hope that ran through the fabric of this new world. There is more, it said. There is more to the universe than you ever imagined.
Then, in the corner of my vision, another kind of darkness appeared—and I felt a chill come over my whole body.
“So, you’re alive.” A slithering whisper in my ear. “I must say, I’m pleased.”
I turned to see a wall of black robes. It was Sharon, towering behind us. Noor pressed her back against the window, but her face betrayed no fear. Hugh and Bronwyn saw what was happening and slunk over to an informational stand about loop costuming, trying not to be noticed.
“Are you going to introduce me to the young lady?” Sharon said.
“Sharon, this is—”
“I’m Noor,” said Noor, thrusting out her hand. “And you are?”