“Mr. Portman.”
I turned to face Miss Peregrine, my dopey grin melting.
“Uh, yeah?”
“Are you ready? Or have you been entirely incapacitated?”
“No, I’m good.”
“I’ll bet you are,” Enoch said with a snicker.
I knocked him with my shoulder as I parted the crowd, and then I threw open the front door and led my peculiar friends out into the world.
* * *
• • •
I lived on a skinny barrier island called Needle Key: five miles of touristy bars and waterfront houses with a bridge at each end, bisected by a winding lane overhung with banyan trees. It only qualified as an island thanks to a long ditch of water that separated us from the mainland by about a thousand feet, which at low tide you could cross without getting your shirt wet. Rich people’s houses fronted the Gulf; the rest of us looked out on Lemon Bay, which on quiet mornings was really very nice, with sailboats drifting by and herons fishing for their breakfast along the banks. It was a safe and sweet place to grow up, and I probably should have been more grateful, but I had spent my youth fighting the sensation—creeping at first, then overwhelming—that I belonged elsewhere, that my brain had begun to melt, and that if I stayed here a day past graduation it would liquify entirely and run out of my ears.
I kept us hidden behind a thicket of hedge at the end of my driveway until all the cars within hearing range had passed, and then we darted across the street to a footpath, intentionally neglected and overgrown with mangroves so tourists couldn’t find it. After a minute or two of bushwhacking, the path broke open onto Needle Key’s main attraction: a long white-sand beach and the gulf, emerald-green and spreading out endlessly.
I heard a few gasps escape my friends. They had seen beaches before—had lived on an island for most of their unnaturally long lives—but they’d rarely seen one so pretty, with water as flat and calm as a lake, an apron of powdery white sand that curved away gently, fringed palms waving. This pristine view was the entire reason some twenty thousand souls lived in an otherwise nowhere town, and in moments like this, with the sun high in the sky and an easy breeze chasing away the heat, you couldn’t fault them their choice.
“Goodness, Jacob,” said Miss Peregrine, taking in a lungful of air. “What a little paradise you have here.”
“Is that the Pacific?” asked Claire.
Enoch snorted. “It’s the Gulf of Mexico. The Pacific’s on the opposite end of the continent.”
We strolled along the beach, the smaller kids circling us as they ran to collect shells, the rest just enjoying the view and the sunshine. I slowed to match Emma’s stride and took her hand. She glanced at me and smiled, and we both sighed at the same time, then laughed. We talked for a while about the beach and how pretty it all was, a topic that was quickly exhausted—and then I asked the group about how life in Devil’s Acre had been for them. I had only heard about their trips outside the Acre via the Panloopticon, but surely they had done more than travel.
“Travel is crucial to one’s development,” said Miss Peregrine, her tone strangely defensive. “Until they have traveled, even the most educated person is ignorant. It’s important the children learn that our society is not the center of the peculiar universe.”
Aside from these occasional field trips, Miss Peregrine explained that she and the other ymbrynes had made a mighty effort to create a stable environment for their wards. Like my friends, most had been torn away from the loops where they’d lived much of their lives. In some cases those loops were now collapsed, gone forever. Many had lost friends in the hollowgast raids, been injured, or endured other traumas. And though Devil’s Acre, with its filth and chaos and its history as the center of Caul’s evil empire, was not an ideal place to recover from trauma, the ymbrynes had done their best to make it a sanctuary. The refugee children, along with many peculiar adults who had fled the wights’ campaign of terror, found new homes there. They had founded a new academy, where daily lectures and discussions were held, taught by ymbrynes when they were available, and by peculiar adults with areas of special expertise when they were not.
“It can be a bit dull, sometimes,” said Millard. “But it’s nice to be among scholars.”
“It’s only dull because you think you know more than the teachers,” said Bronwyn.
“When they aren’t ymbrynes, I usually do,” he replied. “And the ymbrynes are nearly always busy these days.”
They were busy, Miss Peregrine said, with “a hundred thousand unpleasant tasks,” most of which had to do with cleaning up after the wights.
“They left a frightful mess,” she said. There was the literal mess—the wights’ battle-scarred compound, the loops they had damaged but not quite destroyed. More troublesome was the tide of damaged and compromised people they had left behind, like the ambrosia-addicted peculiars of Devil’s Acre. They needed treatment for their addictions, but not all would accept it voluntarily. Then there was the thorny question of who among them could be trusted. Many had collaborated with the wights, some under duress, others willingly and to a degree that seemed clearly malicious, even treasonous. Trials were required. The peculiar justice system, which had been designed to handle at most a few cases per year, was being rapidly expanded to deal with dozens, most of which had not yet begun. Until they did, the accused sat cooling their heels in the prison Caul built for the victims of his cruel experiments.
“And when we aren’t dealing with all of that unpleasantness,” Miss Peregrine said, “the Ymbryne Council is holding meetings. Meetings all day, meetings into the night.”
“About what?” I asked.
“The future,” she replied stiffly.
“The council is having its authority challenged,” said Millard. Miss Peregrine’s expression curdled. Millard went on, oblivious. “Some people are saying it’s time for a change in the way we govern ourselves. That the ymbryne system is outmoded, better suited to an earlier era. That the world has changed, and we must change with it.”
“Ungrateful sods,” Enoch said. “Throw them in jail with the traitors, I say.”
“Now, that’s exactly wrong,” said Miss Peregrine. “Ymbrynes govern by popular consent. Everyone must be allowed to air their ideas, even if they are misguided.”
“What do they disagree with you about?” I asked.
“Whether to go on living in loops, for one thing,” Emma said.
“Don’t most peculiars have to?” I said.
“Yes—unless we were to attempt a large-scale loop collapse event,” said Millard, “like the one that reset our internal clocks. That certainly raised some eyebrows.”