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Olive started to argue, but a sudden tremor shook the tower so hard that we had to cling to the rail or be shaken off.
It was Olive’s way or nothing.
“You get the idea!” Miss Peregrine shouted. “Do as Olive says and, most importantly, don’t let go until we reach the ground!”
Little Olive bent her knees, kicked one foot down toward Bronwyn, and offered it to her. Bronwyn took Olive’s foot, then reached up and grabbed the other one. Olive let go of the rail and stood up in Bronwyn’s hands, pushing toward the sky like a swimmer kicking off the wall of a pool.
Bronwyn was lifted off her feet. Emma quickly grabbed hold of Bronwyn’s legs, and then she was lifted, too, as Olive strained upward, gritting her teeth, willing herself higher. Then it was my turn—but Olive, it seemed, was running out of lift power. She struggled and groaned, dog-paddling toward the sky, but she was out of juice. That’s when Miss Peregrine turned into a bird, flapped into the air, hooked her talons through the back of Olive’s dress, and lifted.
My feet came off the ground. Hugh grabbed onto my legs and Horace onto his legs and Enoch onto his and so on, until even Perplexus and Addison and Sharon and his cousins had caught a ride. We strung out into the air like a strange, wiggling kite, Millard its invisible tail. The other, smaller ymbrynes hooked into our clothes here and there and flapped furiously, adding what lift they could.
The last of us had only just left the tower when the whole thing began to crumble. I looked down in time to see it fall. It happened quickly, tumbling in on itself, the top section seeming to implode as if it had been sucked into the collapsing loop. After that the rest just went, tipping over in one section before breaking in the middle and slumping into a huge cloud of dust and debris, the sound like a million bricks being poured into a quarry. By then Miss Peregrine’s strength was flagging and we were falling slowly toward the ground, the ymbrynes pulling us hard to one side for a soft landing away from the wreckage.
We touched down in the courtyard, Millard first and then finally Olive, who was so spent that she landed on her back and stayed there, breathing like she’d just run a marathon. We gathered around, cheering and applauding her.
Her eyes got big and she pointed up. “Look!”
In the air behind us, where the top of the tower had been just moments before, there spun a small vortex of shimmering silver, like a miniature hurricane. It was the last of the collapsing loop. We watched hypnotized as it shrank, spinning faster and faster. When it became too small to see, there issued from it a sound like the crack of a sonic boom:
“ALMAAAAAAAAAA …”
And then the whirlwind winked out, sucking Caul’s voice away with it.
After the loop collapsed and the tower fell, we weren’t allowed to stand shell-shocked and gaping—at least not for long. Though it seemed the worst dangers were behind us and most of our enemies had been felled or captured, there was chaos all around and work to be done. Despite our exhaustion and bruises and sprains, the ymbrynes set about doing what ymbrynes do best, which was to create order. They changed into human form and took charge. The compound was searched for hidden wights. Two surrendered outright, and Addison discovered another—a miserable-looking woman hiding in a hole in the ground.
She came out with her arms raised, begging for mercy. Sharon’s cousins were employed constructing a makeshift jail to hold our small but growing number of prisoners, and they set happily to work, singing while they hammered. Sharon was interrogated by Miss Peregrine and Miss Avocet, but after just a few minutes of questioning, they were satisfied that he was merely a mercenary, not a secret operative or a traitor. Sharon had seemed as shocked by Bentham’s betrayal as the rest of us.
In short order the wights’ prisons and laboratories were emptied and their machines of terror smashed. The subjects of their horrible experiments were brought out into the open and attended to. Dozens more were freed from another block of cells. They emerged from the underground building where they’d been held looking thin and ragged. Some wandered in a daze and had to be corralled and watched, lest they walk away and get lost. Others were so overwhelmed by gratitude that they couldn’t stop thanking us. One small girl spent half an hour going from one peculiar to another, surprising us with hugs. “You don’t know what you did for us,” she kept saying. “You don’t know what you did.”
It was impossible not to be affected by it, and as we gave them what comfort we could, we were beset by sniffles and sighs. I could not begin to imagine what my friends had been through, much less those who’d spent weeks or months in Caul’s keeping. Compared to that, my bruises and traumas were inconsequential.
The rescued peculiars I’ll remember most were three brothers. They seemed in fair health but were so shocked by what they’d experienced that they would not speak. At the first opportunity they retreated from the crowd, found a bit of rubble to hunker on, and stared hollowly around them, the oldest with his arms stretched around the younger two. As if they could not quite square the scene before them with the hell they had accepted as reality.
Emma and I crossed to where they were sitting. “You’re safe now,” she said gently.
They looked at her as if they didn’t know the meaning of the word.
Enoch saw us talking to them and came over with Bronwyn. She was dragging a barely conscious wight behind her, a white-coated lab worker with his hands tied. The boys recoiled.
“He can’t hurt you anymore,” Bronwyn said. “None of them can.”
“Maybe we should leave him here with you awhile,” said Enoch with a devilish grin. “I’ll bet you’d have a lot to talk about.”
The wight lifted his head. When he saw the boys, his blackened eyes widened.
“Stop it,” I said. “Don’t torment them.”
The youngest boy’s hands curled into fists and he started to get up, but the oldest boy held him back and whispered something in his ear. The younger boy closed his eyes and nodded, as if putting something away, then tucked his fists tightly under his arms.
“No thank’y,” he said in a polite Southern drawl.
“Come on,” I said, and we let them be, Bronwyn dragging the wight along behind her.
* * *
We milled about the compound, awaiting instructions from the ymbrynes. It was a relief, for once, not to be the ones who decided everything. We felt spent but energized, exhausted beyond belief but charged with the crazy knowledge that we had survived.
There were spontaneous bursts of cheering, laughter, songs. Millard and Bronwyn danced across the scarred ground. Olive and Claire clung to Miss Peregrine, who carried them in her arms as she buzzed around, checking on things. Horace kept pinching himself, suspicious that this was just one of his dreams, some beautiful future that hadn’t yet come to be. Hugh wandered off by himself, no doubt missing Fiona, whose absence had left a hole in us all. Millard was busy fretting over his hero, Perplexus, whose rapid aging had stopped when we entered Abaton and, strangely, not yet resumed. But it would, Millard assured us, and now that Caul’s tower was destroyed, it was unclear how Perplexus would reach his old loop. (There was Bentham’s Panloopticon, of course, but which of its hundred doors was the right one?)
Then there was the matter of Emma and me. We were attached at the hip and yet hardly exchanged a word. We were afraid to talk to each other, I think, because of what we had to talk about.
What would happen next? What would become of us? I knew Emma couldn’t leave peculiardom. She would have to live inside a loop for the rest of her life, be it Devil’s Acre or some other, better place. But I was free to go. I had family and a home waiting for me. A life, or the pale approximation of one. But I had a family here, too. And I had Emma. And there was this new Jacob I had become, was still becoming. Would he survive back in Florida?
I needed all of it. Both families, both Jacobs—all of Emma. I knew I would have to choose, and I was afraid it would split me in half.
It was all too much, more than I co
uld face so soon after the trials we’d just endured. I needed a few more hours, a day, to pretend. So Emma and I stood shoulder to shoulder and looked outward, throwing ourselves into whatever the ymbrynes needed of us.
The ymbrynes, overly protective by nature, decided we’d been through enough. We needed rest, and besides, there were tasks, they said, that peculiar children had no business taking part in. When the tower fell it had crushed a smaller building beneath it, but they didn’t want us combing the wreckage for survivors. Elsewhere in the compound there were ambro vials to be recovered, which they didn’t want us going near. I wondered what they’d do with them, or if those stolen souls could ever be reunited with their rightful owners.
I thought about the vial made from my grandfather’s soul. I’d felt so violated when Bentham used it—and yet, if he hadn’t, we never would have escaped the Library of Souls. So in the end, really, it was my grandfather’s soul that had saved us. It was gratifying to know that at least it had not gone to waste.
There was work to be done outside the wights’ compound, as well. Along Louche Lane and elsewhere in Devil’s Acre, enslaved peculiar children needed to be freed, but the ymbrynes insisted they should be the ones to do it, along with some peculiar adults. As it happened, they would face no resistance: the slavers and other turncoats had fled the Acre the moment the wights fell. The children would be collected and brought to a safe house. The traitors hunted down and brought before tribunals. None of this was our concern, we were told. Right now we needed a place to recuperate, as well as a base of operations from which the reconstruction of peculiardom could begin—and none of us wanted to stay in the wights’ fear-haunted fortress any longer than we had to.
I suggested Bentham’s house. It had tons of space, beds, facilities, a live-in doctor, and a Panloopticon (which, you never know, might come in handy for something). We moved as dark was falling, loading one of the wights’ transport trucks with those of us who couldn’t walk, the rest marching behind it. We crossed out of the fortress with a little help from the bridge hollow, which lifted the truck across the gap first and the rest of us in groups of three. Some of the kids were frightened of the hollow and needed coaxing. Others couldn’t wait and clamored for another ride once they’d crossed. I indulged them. My control over hollows had become second nature, which was satisfying if slightly bittersweet. Now that hollows were nearly extinct, my peculiar ability seemed obsolete—this manifestation of it, anyway. But I was okay with that. I didn’t care about having a showy power; it was just a party trick now. I’d have been much happier if hollows had never existed.
We traveled through Devil’s Acre in a slow procession, those of us on foot surrounding the vehicle like a float in a parade, others riding its bumpers and roof. It felt like a victory lap, and the Acre’s peculiars flooded out of their homes and hovels to watch us pass by. They had seen the tower fall. They knew things had changed. Many applauded. Some gave salutes. Others lurked in the shadows, ashamed of the role they’d played.
When we arrived at Bentham’s house, Mother Dust and Reynaldo met us at the door. We were welcomed warmly and told the house was ours to use as we needed. Mother Dust immediately began treating the injured, showing them to beds, making them comfortable, anointing them with dust. She offered to heal my bruises and the bite wounds across my stomach first, but I told her I could wait. Others were worse off.
I told her how I’d used her finger. How it had saved my life, and the lives of others. She shrugged it off and turned back to her work.
