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As the night wore on, Emma and I talked about what the coming day might hold. Assuming Bentham could get his machine working again, it was possible that in a matter of hours we would find ourselves inside the wights’ fortress. We might see our friends again, and Miss Peregrine.
“If we’re very sneaky, and very, very lucky,” Emma said. “And if …”
She hesitated. We were sitting side by side on a long wooden bench against a wall, and now she shifted so that I couldn’t see her face.
“What?” I said.
She looked back at me, her face pained. “If they’re still alive.”
“They are.”
“No, I’m tired of pretending. By now the wights could’ve harvested their souls for ambrosia. Or realized the ymbrynes are useless and decided to torture them instead, or milk their souls, or made an example of someone for trying to escape …”
“Stop it,” I said. “It hasn’t been that long.”
“By the time we get there it’ll have been forty-eight hours, at least. And a lot of awful things can happen in forty-eight hours.”
“We don’t have to imagine every single one of them. You sound like Horace with all these worst-case scenarios. There’s no use tormenting ourselves until we know for sure what’s happened.”
“Yes, there is,” she insisted. “There’s a perfectly good reason to torment ourselves. If we’ve considered all the worst possibilities and one turns out to be true, we won’t be completely unprepared for it.”
“I don’t think I could ever prepare myself for those kinds of things.”
She put her head in her hands and let out a shaky sigh. It was all too much to think about.
I wanted to tell her then that I loved her. I thought that might help, by grounding us in something we were sure about rather than everything we weren’t—but we hadn’t said the words to each other many times, and I couldn’t bring myself to say them now in front of two perfect strangers.
The more I thought about loving Emma, the shakier and sicker it made me feel, precisely because our future was so uncertain. I needed to imagine a future for myself with Emma in it, but it was impossible to picture our lives even a day from now. It was a constant struggle for me, having no idea what tomorrow held. I’m cautious by nature, a planner—someone who likes to know what’s around the next corner and the corner after that—and this entire experience, from the moment I ventured into the abandoned shell of Miss Peregrine’s house to now, had been one long free-fall into the void. To survive it I’d had to become a new person, someone flexible and sure footed and brave. Someone my grandfather would’ve been proud of. But my transformation had not been total. This new Jacob was grafted onto the old one, and I still had moments—plenty of them—of abject terror and wishing I’d never heard of any damned Miss Peregrine and needing very badly for the world to stop spinning so I could just hang on to something for a few minutes. I wondered, with a sinking ache, which Jacob loved Emma. Was it the new one, who was ready for anything, or the old one, who just needed something to hang on to?
I decided that I didn’t want to think about it right now—a distinctly old-Jacob way of handling things—and focused instead on the distraction nearest at hand: the hollow, and what would happen when it woke. I would have to give him up, it seemed.
“I wish I could take him with us,” I said. “He would make it so easy to smash anyone who got in our way. But I guess he has to stay behind to keep the machine running.”
“So it’s a him now.” She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t get too attached. Remember, if you gave that thing half a chance, it would eat you alive.”
“I know, I know,” I said, sighing.
“And maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to smash everything. I’m sure the wights know how to handle hollows. After all, they used to be hollows.”
“It’s a unique gift you have,” said Reynaldo, speaking to us for the first time in over an hour. He had taken a break from monitoring the hollow’s wound to rummage through Bentham’s cabinets for food, and now he and Mother Dust were seated at a small table, sharing a block of blue-veined cheese.
“It’s a strange gift, though,” I said. I’d been thinking about how strange it was for a while but hadn’t quite been able to articulate it until now. “In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be any hollows. And if there weren’t any hollows, my special sight would have nothing to see, and no one would understand the weird language I can speak. You wouldn’t even know I had a peculiar ability.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re here now,” Emma said.
“Yeah, but … doesn’t it seem almost too random? I could’ve been born anytime. My grandfather, too. Hollows have existed for only the last hundred years or so, but it just so happens that we were both born now, right when we were needed. Why?”
“I guess it was meant to be,” Emma said. “Or maybe there have always been people who can do what you do, only they never knew it. Maybe lots of people go through life never knowing they’re peculiar.”
Mother Dust leaned toward Reynaldo and whispered.
“She says it’s neither,” said Reynaldo. “Your true gift probably isn’t manipulating hollowgast—that’s just its most obvious application.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “What else could it be?”
Mother Dust whispered again.
“It’s simpler than that,” said Reynaldo. “Just as someone who’s a gifted cellist wasn’t born with an aptitude for only that instrument but for music in general, you weren’t born only to manipulate hollows. Nor you,” he said to Emma, “to make fire.”
Emma frowned. “I’m over a hundred years old. I think I know my own peculiar ability by now—and I definitely can’t manipulate water, or air, or dirt. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t,” Reynaldo said. “Early in life we recognize certain talents in ourselves, and we focus on those to the exclusion of others. It’s not that nothing else is possible, but that nothing else was nurtured.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” I said.
“The point is, it’s not so impossibly random that you have a talent for hollowgast manipulation. Your gift developed in that direction because that’s what was needed.”
“If that’s true, then why can’t all of us control hollows?” Emma said. “Every peculiar could use some of what Jacob’s got.”
“Because only his basic talent was capable of developing that way. In the times before hollows, the talents of peculiars with souls akin to his probably manifested some other way. It’s said that the Library of Souls was staffed by people who could read peculiar souls like they were books. If those librarians were alive today, perhaps they’d be like him.”
“Why do you say that?” I said. “Is there something about seeing hollows that’s like reading souls?”
Reynaldo conferred with Mother Dust. “You seem to be a reader
of hearts,” he said. “You saw some good in Bentham’s, after all. You chose to forgive him.”
“Forgive him?” I said. “What would I have to forgive him for?”
Mother Dust knew she’d said too much, but it was too late to hold back. She whispered to Reynaldo.
“For what he did to your grandfather,” he said.
I turned to Emma, but she seemed just as confused as I was.
“And what did he do to my grandfather?”
“I’ll tell them,” said a voice from the doorway, and then Bentham hobbled in by himself. “It’s my shame, and I should be the one to confess it.”
He shuffled past the sink, pulled a chair away from the table, and sat down facing us.
“During the war, your grandfather was highly valued for his special facility with hollows. We had a secret project, some technologists and I—we thought we could replicate his ability and give it to other peculiars. Inoculate them against hollows, like a vaccine. If we could all see and sense them, they would cease to be a threat, and the war against their kind would be won. Your grandfather made many noble sacrifices, but none so great as this: he agreed to participate.”
Emma’s face was tense as she listened. I could see she’d never heard any of this before.
“We took just a little bit,” Bentham said. “Just a piece of his second soul. We thought it could be spared, or would be replenished, like when someone gives blood.”
“You took his soul,” Emma said, her voice wavering.
Bentham held his finger and thumb a centimeter apart. “This much. We split it up and administered it to several test subjects. Although it had the desired effect, it didn’t last long, and repeated exposure began to rob them of their native abilities. It was a failure.”
“And what about Abe?” Emma said. In her tone was the special malice she reserved for those who hurt people she loved. “What did you do to him?”
“He was weakened, and his talent diluted,” said Bentham. “Before the procedure, he was much like young Jacob. His ability to control hollows was a deciding factor in our war with the wights. After the procedure, however, he found he couldn’t control them any longer, and his second sight became blurred. I’m told that soon afterward he left peculiardom altogether. He worried he would be a danger to his fellow peculiars, rather than a help. He felt he could no longer protect them.”
