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If there was someone among us who would rather have fled, they stayed quiet. Even the ymbrynes, who had sworn oaths to keep us safe, didn’t argue. They knew what sort of fate awaited any of us who were recaptured.
“You give the word,” said Emma.
I craned my neck around the wall. The wights were closing fast, no more than a hundred feet away now. But I wanted them closer still—close enough that we might easily knock the guns from their hands.
Shots rang out. A piercing scream came from above.
“Olive!” Emma shouted. “They’re shooting at Olive!”
We’d left the poor girl hanging up there. The wights were taking potshots at her while she squealed and waved her limbs like a starfish. There was no time to reel her in, but we couldn’t just leave her for target practice.
“Let’s give them something better to shoot at,” I said. “Ready?”
Their answer was resounding and affirmative. I shimmied onto the back of my crouched hollow. “LET’S GO!” I shouted.
The hollow leapt to its feet, nearly bucking me off, then launched forward like a racehorse at the starting gun. We burst from behind the wall, the hollow and I leading the charge, my friends and our ymbrynes close behind. I let out a screaming war cry, not so much to scare the wights as to tear down the fear that was clawing at me, and my friends did the same. The wights balked, and for a moment they couldn’t seem to decide whether to keep charging or stop and shoot at us. That bought the hollow and me enough time to clear much of the open ground that separated us.
It didn’t take long for the wights to make up their minds. They stopped, leveled their guns at us like a firing squad, and let loose a volley of bullets. They whizzed around me, pocking the ground, lighting up my pain receptors as they slammed into the hollow. Praying it hadn’t been hit anywhere vital, I sank low to shield myself behind its body and urged it forward, faster, using its tongues like extra legs to speed us on.
The hollow and I closed the remaining gap in just a few seconds, my friends close behind. Then we were among them, fighting hand-to-hand, and the advantage was ours. While I concentrated on knocking the guns out of the wights’ hands, my friends put their peculiar talents to good use. Emma swung her hands like flaming clubs, cutting through a line of wights. Bronwyn hurled the bricks she’d gathered, then punched and pummeled the wights with her bare hands. Hugh’s lone bee had recently made some friends, and as he cheered them on (“Go for the eyes, fellows!”) they swirled around and dive-bombed our enemy wherever they could. So did the ymbrynes, who’d turned themselves into birds after the first gunshots. Miss Peregrine was most fearsome, her huge beak and talons sending wights running, but even small, colorful Miss Bunting made herself useful, ripping one wight’s hair and pecking his head hard enough to make him miss the shot he was taking—which allowed Claire to leap up and bite him on the shoulder with her wide, sharp-toothed backmouth. Enoch did his part, too, revealing from under his shirt three clay men with forks for legs and knives for arms, which he sent hacking after the wights’ ankles. All the while, Olive shouted advice to us from her bird’s-eye view. “Behind you, Emma! He’s going for his gun, Hugh!”
Despite all our peculiar ingenuity, however, we were outnumbered, and the wights were fighting as if their lives depended on it—which likely they did.
Something hard crashed into my head—the butt of a gun—and I hung limp from the hollow’s back for a moment, the world spinning around me. Miss Bunting was caught and thrown to the ground. It was chaos, awful bloody chaos, and the wights were beginning to take the momentum, forcing us back.
And then, from behind me, I heard a familiar roar. My senses returning, I looked and saw Bentham, galloping toward the fight astride the back of his grimbear. Both were soaking wet, having come through the Panloopticon the same way Emma and I had.
“Hullo, young man!” he called, riding up next to me. “In need of some assistance?”
Before I could reply, my hollow was shot again, the bullet passing through the side of its neck and grazing my thigh, painting a bloody line through my torn pants.
“Yes, please!” I shouted.
“PT, you heard the boy!” Bentham said. “KILL!”
The bear dove into the fight, swinging his giant paws and knocking wights aside like they were bowling pins. One ran up and shot PT point-blank in the chest with a small handgun. The bear seemed merely annoyed, then picked up the wight and sent him flying. Soon, with my hollow and Bentham’s grim working together, we had the wights on the defensive. When we’d picked off enough of them that it became clear they were outnumbered, their ranks whittled to no more than ten, they took off and ran.
“Don’t let them escape!” Emma cried.
We tore after the wights on foot, on wing, on bearback and hollowback. We chased them through the smoking ruins of the parrot house, across ground stippled with catapulted rodents from Sharon’s insurrection, toward an arched gate built into the looming outer wall.
Miss Peregrine screamed overhead, dive-bombing fleeing wights. She pulled one off his feet by the back of his neck, but this, and more attacks from Hugh’s bees, only made the nine that were left run even faster. Their lead was growing and my hollow was beginning to fail, leaking black fluid from a half dozen wounds.
The wights crashed on blindly, the gate’s iron portcullis rising as they neared it.
“Stop them!” I shouted, hoping that beyond the gate, Sharon and his unruly crowd might hear.
And then I realized: the bridge! There was still another hollowgast left—the one inside the bridge. If I could get control of him in time, maybe I could stop the wights from escaping.
But no. They were already through the gate, running up the bridge, and I was hopelessly behind. By the time I passed through the gate, the bridge hollow had already picked up and tossed five of them across to Smoking Street, where only a thin crowd of ambro addicts was lingering—not enough to stop them. The four wights who hadn’t yet crossed were stuck at the bridge gap, waiting their turn to be flung.
As my hollow and I started running up the bridge, I felt the bridge hollow come online inside me. It was picking up three of the four wights and lifting them across.
Stop, I said aloud in Hollow.
Or at least that’s what I thought I said, though maybe something got lost in translation, and maybe stop sounds a lot like drop in hollowspeak. Because rather than stopping midair and then bringing the three kicking and terrified wights back to our side of the bridge, the hollow simply let them go. (How strange!)
All the peculiars on our side of the chasm and the addicts on the other side came to the edge to watch them fall, howling and flailing all the way down through layers of sulfurous green mist until—ploop!—they plunged into the boiling river and disappeared.
A cheer went up on both sides, and a grating voice I recognized said, “Serves ’em right. They were lousy tippers, anyway!”
It was one of two bridge heads that were still on their pikes. “Didn’t your mum ever tell you not to swim on a full stomach?” said the other. “WAIT TWENTY MINUTES!”
The lone wight remaining on our side threw down his gun and raised his hands in surrender, while the five who’d made it across were quickly vanishing into a cloud of ash the wind had kicked up.
We stood watching them go. There was no way we’d catch them now.
“Curse our luck,” Bentham said. “Even that small number of wights could wreak havoc for years to come.”
“Agreed, brother, though honestly I didn’t realize you gave a titmouse what happened to the rest of us.” We turned to see Miss Peregrine walking toward us, returned to human form, a shawl clasped modestly around her shoulders. Her eyes were locked on Bentham, her expression sour and unwelcoming.
“Hello, Alma! Fantastic to see you!” he said with overeager cheerfulness. “And of course I give a …” He cleared his throat aw
kwardly. “Why, I’m the reason you’re not still in a prison cell! Go on, children, tell them!”
“Mr. Bentham helped us a lot,” I admitted, though I didn’t really want to insert myself into a sibling spat.
“In that case, all due thanks,” Miss Peregrine said coldly. “I’ll ensure the Council of Ymbrynes is made aware of the role you played here. Perhaps they’ll see fit to lighten your sentence.”
“Sentence?” Emma said, looking sharply at Bentham. “What sentence?”
His lip twisted. “Banishment. You don’t think I’d live in this pit if I was welcome anywhere else, do you? I was framed, unjustly accused of—”
“Collusion.” Miss Peregrine said. “Collaboration with the enemy. Betrayal after betrayal.”
“I was acting as a double agent, Alma, mining our brother for information. I explained this to you!” He was whining, his palms out like a beggar’s. “You know I have every reason to hate Jack!”
Miss Peregrine raised her hand to stop him. She’d heard this story before and didn’t want to again. “When he betrayed your grandfather,” she said to me, “that was the last straw.”
“That was an accident,” Bentham said, drawing back in offense.
“Then what became of the suul you drew from him?” said Miss Peregrine.
“It was injected into the test subjects!”
Miss Peregrine shook her head. “We reverse-engineered your experiment. They were given suul from barnyard animals, which can only mean that you kept Abe’s for yourself.”
“What an absurd allegation!” he cried. “Is that what you told the council? That’s why I’m still rotting in here, isn’t it?” I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely surprised or just acting. “I knew you felt threatened by my intellect and superior leadership capabilities. But that you’d stoop to such lies to keep me out of your way … do you know how many years I’ve spent fighting to eradicate the scourge of ambrosia use? What on earth would I want with that poor man’s suul?”
