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I insisted. “You deserve a medal,” I said. “I don’t know if peculiars give medals, but if they do I’ll make sure you get one.”
She seemed taken aback by this somehow, and let out a choking sob before hurrying away.
“Did I say something wrong?” I asked Reynaldo.
“I don’t know,” he said, concerned, and went after her.
Nim meandered about the house in a daze, unable to believe what Bentham had done. “There must be some mistake,” he kept repeating. “Mr. Bentham would never betray us like that.”
“Snap out of it!” Emma said to him. “Your boss was a slimeball.”
The truth was a bit more nuanced, I thought, but making an argument for the complexity of Bentham’s moral character wasn’t going to make me terribly popular. Bentham didn’t have to give up that recipe or take on his monstrous brother. He made a choice. In the end he’d damned himself in order to save the rest of us.
“He just needs time,” Sharon said of Nim. “It’s a lot to process. Bentham had a lot of us fooled.”
“Even you?” I said.
“Me especially.” He shrugged and shook his head. He seemed conflicted and sad. “He weaned me off ambrosia, pulled me out of addiction, saved my life. There was good in him. I suppose I let that blind me to the bad.”
“He must’ve had one confidant,” Emma said. “You know, a henchman. An Igor.”
“His assistant!” I said. “Has anyone seen him?”
No one had. We searched the house for him, but Bentham’s stone-faced right-hand man had disappeared. Miss Peregrine gathered everyone together and asked Emma and me describe him in detail, in case he returned. “He should be considered dangerous,” she said. “If you see him, do not engage. Run and tell an ymbryne.”
“Tell an ymbryne,” Enoch muttered. “Doesn’t she realize that we saved them?”
Miss Peregrine overheard him. “Yes, Enoch. You were brilliant, all of you. And you’ve grown up remarkably. But even grown-ups have elders who know better.”
“Yes, miss,” he said, chastened.
Afterward I asked Miss Peregrine if she thought Bentham had planned to betray us from the beginning.
“My brother was an opportunist above all else,” she said. “I think part of him did want to do the right thing, and when he helped you and Miss Bloom, he did so genuinely. But all along he’d been making preparations to betray us, in case that turned out to be advantageous for him. And when I told him where to stuff it, he decided that it was.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Miss P,” said Emma. “After what he did to Abe, I wouldn’t have forgiven him, either.”
“Still, I could have been kinder.” She frowned, her eyes wandering. “Sibling relationships can be complex. I wonder, sometimes, if my own actions had some bearing upon the paths my brothers chose. Could I have been a better sister to them? Perhaps, as a young ymbryne, I was too focused on myself.”
I said, “Miss Peregrine, that’s”—and then stopped myself from using the word ridiculous, because I’d never had a brother or sister, and maybe it wasn’t.
* * *
Later we took Miss Peregrine and some of the ymbrynes down to the basement to show them the heart of Bentham’s Panloopticon machine. I could feel my hollow inside the battery chamber, weak but alive. I felt awful for it and asked if I could take it out, but Miss Peregrine said that for now they needed the machine working. Having so many loops accessible under one roof would allow them to spread news of our victory quickly throughout peculiardom, to assess the damage done by the wights and to begin rebuilding.
“I hope you understand, Mr. Portman,” said Miss Peregrine.
“I do …”
“Jacob has a soft spot for that hollow,” Emma said.
“Well,” I said, a little embarrassed. “He was my first.”
Miss Peregrine looked at me strangely but promised she’d do what she could.
The bite wound across my stomach was becoming too unbearable to ignore, so Emma and I joined the line to see Mother Dust, which snaked out of her makeshift clinic in the kitchen and down the hall. It was amazing to watch person after person hobble in, battered and bruised, nursing a broken toe or a mild concussion—or in Miss Avocet’s case, a bullet from Caul’s antique pistol lodged in her shoulder—only to stride out a few minutes later looking better than new. In fact, they were looking so good that Miss Peregrine pulled Reynaldo aside and asked him to remind Mother Dust that she wa
s not a renewable resource, and not to waste herself on minor wounds that would heal just fine on their own.
“I tried to tell her myself,” he replied, “but she’s a perfectionist. She won’t listen to me.”
So Miss Peregrine went into the kitchen to have a word with Mother Dust in person. She came out again five minutes later looking sheepish, several cuts on her face having disappeared and her arm, which hadn’t hung straight since Caul had slammed her into that cavern wall, swinging freely at her side. “What a stubborn woman!” she exclaimed.
When it was my turn to go in and see her, I almost refused treatment—she only had a thumb and forefinger left on her good hand. But she took one look at the zagging, blood-encrusted cuts across my belly and practically shoved me onto the cot they’d set up by the sink. The bite was becoming infected, she told me through Reynaldo. Hollow teeth were crawling with nasty bacteria, and left untreated I would get very sick. So I relented. Mother Dust sprinkled her powder across my torso, and in a few minutes I was feeling much improved.
Before I left, I tried to tell her again how much her sacrifice had meant, and how the piece of herself she’d given to me had saved us. “Really, without that finger, I never would’ve been able to—”
But she turned away as soon as I started talking, as if the words thank you burned her ears.
Reynaldo hurried me out. “I’m sorry, Mother Dust has many other patients to see.”
Emma met me in the hall. “You look marvelous!” she said. “Thank the birds, I was really starting to worry about that bite …”
“Be sure and tell her about your ears,” I said.
“What?”
“Your ears,” I said louder, pointing to them. Emma’s ears hadn’t stopped ringing since the library. Because she’d had to keep her hands aflame to light our way as we escaped, she hadn’t been able to block out the terrific noise—which, I worried, had literally been deafening. “Just don’t mention the finger!”
“The what?”
