She looked at him. “What will you think?”
Englebert stared into the fire, struggling for words. The silence between them seemed answer enough, so Ymeene slipped away and walked to her tent. As she lay down to sleep, a great sadness stole over her. She was sure it would be her last night as a human.
Ymeene left at the first inkling of dawn, before anyone else had woken. She couldn’t bear to say good-bye. She walked to the edge of the camp and turned into a hawk, and as she leaped into the air, she wondered if she would ever find another group that would accept her, human or avian.
Ymeene had only been flying a few minutes when she spotted the normals’ fighting force massed below. But it was no loose brigade of a few dozen men—it was an army of hundreds, and they blanketed the hills in glinting armor.
The peculiars would be slaughtered! She turned around at once and flew back to warn them. She found Tombs in his tent and told them what she’d seen.
He didn’t seem surprised in the least.
He had known.
“Why didn’t you tell them so many soldiers were coming?” Ymeene said. “You lied!”
“They would have been terrified,” he said. “They would not have comported themselves with dignity.”
“They should be terrified!” she shouted. “They should have fled by now!”
“It wouldn’t have done any good,” he said. “The normals’ king has ordered Britain cleansed of peculiars from mountains to sea. They would find us eventually.”
“Not if we leave Britain,” Ymeene said.
“Leave Britain!” he said, shocked. “But we’ve been here hundreds of years!”
“And we’ll be dead a lot longer than that,” Ymeene replied.
“It’s a matter of honor,” Tombs said. “I suppose a bird wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand all too well,” she replied, and went out to warn the others.
But it was too late: the normals’ army was on their doorstep, a swarm of well-armed soldiers already visible in the distance. Worse yet, the peculiars couldn’t even run—the normals were closing in from all sides.
The peculiars huddled in their camp, terrified. Death seemed inevitable. Ymeene could easily have changed form and flown to safety—the peculiars urged her to, in fact—but she could not bring herself to leave. They had been tricked, lied to, and the sacrifice they were about to make was no longer voluntary.
To leave now would not have felt like an exercise of her principles, but like abandonment and treachery.
So she walked through the camp, embracing her friends. Englebert hugged her the hardest, and even after he’d let go, he spent a long moment gazing at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Memorizing the face of my friend,” he said. “So that I might recall it even in death.”
Silence fell over them and over the camp, and for a while the only sounds were the thunder and clang of the approaching army. And then the sun came out suddenly from behind a dark cloud, bathing the land in glinting light, and Ymeene thought the sight so beautiful that she wished she could see it once more before they were killed. So she repeated it, and the peculiars were so mesmerized that she repeated it a second time. Only then did they notice that, in the minutes they had spent watching the sun, the normals’ army had not come any closer. With every repetition, their enemies faded and reappeared farther away, many hundreds of yards in the distance.
It was then that Ymeene realized her time-looping talent had a use she’d never fully understood—one that would change peculiar society forever, though she couldn’t have known it then. She’d made a safe place for them, a bubble of stalled time, and the peculiars watched in fascination as the normals’ army advanced toward them and then faded away, over and over again, in a three-minute loop.
“How long can you keep this going?” Englebert asked her.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve never repeated something more than a few times. But for quite a while, I think.”
Tombs burst out of his tent, baffled and angry. “What are you doing?” he shouted at Ymeene. “Stop that!”
“Why should I?” she said. “I’m saving all our lives!”
“You’re only delaying the inevitable,” Tombs replied. “I order you, by authority of the council, to desist immediately!”
“A pox on your council!” said Millicent Neary. “You’re nothing but liars!”
Tombs had begun to enumerate the punishments that awaited anyone who defied the council’s orders when Eustace Corncrake marched up to him and pulled his nose, which caused Tombs’s face to turn inside out. He ran away yelping and threatening recriminations, his head all pink and soft.
Ymeene kept looping. The peculiars rallied around her, cheering her on, but worrying quietly that she would not be able to keep it going forever. Ymeene shared their concern: she had to repeat the loop every
three minutes, so she could not sleep—but eventually her body would force her to, and the army that loomed perpetually in the distance would close in and finally crush them.
After two days and a night, Ymeene could no longer trust herself to stay awake, so Englebert volunteered to sit beside her, and every time her eyes fell closed he would nudge her. After three days and two nights, when Englebert began to fall asleep himself, Eustace Corncrake volunteered to sit by his side and nudge him, and then, when Eustace began to lose his battle with sleep, Millicent Neary volunteered to sit by him and drip water on his face whenever his eyes closed—so that eventually the whole camp of peculiars were sitting in a long chain, helping one another to help Englebert to help Ymeene stay awake.
After four days and three nights, Ymeene still had not missed a loop reset. She had, however, begun to hallucinate from exhaustion. She thought her lost brothers had come to see her, five goshawks flying loops of their own above the camp. They screeched words at her that made no sense: Again!
Another!
Again! Again!
Loop-the-loop to double its skin!
She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, then drank some of the water Millicent Neary was dripping on Eustace Corncrake. When she looked up again her ghostly brothers were gone, but their words stayed with her. She wondered if her brothers—or some part of her own, embedded instinct—were trying to tell her something useful.
Again, again.
The answer came to her on the fifth day. Or rather an answer: she wasn’t sure if it was the right one, but she was entirely certain that she wouldn’t last another day. Before long, no amount of nudging would keep her from sleep.
So: she reset the loop. (She’d long since lost count of how many times she’d made that sun peek out from behind that cloud, but it had to be thousands.) And then, just a few seconds after having looped the loop, she made another one— inside the first loop.
The results were instantaneous and bizarre. There was a strange sort of doubling of everything around them—the sun, the cloud, the army in the distance—as if her vision had blurred. The world took a short while to come back into focus, and when it did, it was all a bit older than before. The sun was farther behind the cloud. The army was farther away. And this time it took six minutes, not three, for the sun to come out from behind the cloud.