The compass needle inside me spun. I couldn’t tell how hurt the hollowgast was, but I was sure it had been thrown some distance by whatever had just happened aboveground. Which meant—
“We got it!” I shouted.
Noor cautiously uncovered her head. “Is it dead?”
“It’s hurt, I think, not dead. But let’s not stick around to find out.”
I ran to the wall and started prying open the door that was partially hidden beside the supply cabinet. “Another exit,” I explained. “This leads to a different house, and a car we can use.”
“What about V?” Noor said.
I tried to imagine dragging her body down tunnels and up ladders while an injured and furious hollowgast chased us. But then Noor seemed to read my mind without me having to explain, and she shook her head and muttered, “Never mind.”
“We’ll come back,” I assured her.
She didn’t say anything, just dug her fingers into the doorjamb and started to pull.
We sprinted through the low-ceilinged tunnel that ran below my grandfather’s suburban street, then climbed another ladder and up through a hatch into the bedroom of the dummy house. There was no time to look out the window to check the damage to my grandfather’s house, no time for anything but the motion of our legs and my hand pulling Noor’s, and thank God the house was a mirror of Abe’s so I could find my way quickly down the hallway and into the living room with no unnecessary expenditure of thought. The living room was howling and wet, gauzy curtains flapping at the shattered bay window, a fallen oak branch reaching into the room like a monster’s hand.
A glimpse, barely registered, of flames across the street.
No sign of the hollowgast. Despite myself, I felt a surge of hope that it was dead.
We burst into the garage. The boatlike Caprice was just where it had been, the spot beside it vacant. (The Aston had been abandoned weeks ago in Brooklyn and was now surely in the wights’ hands or had been stolen and stripped for parts.) We threw open the Caprice’s long doors and sank into its seats. The keys were in the cup holder, the garage opener clipped to the visor. I reached up to touch the button, but Noor snatched it before I could.
“One thing,” she said. It was the first time my eyes had come to rest on anything since we’d started running. Even in the unflattering glare of the Caprice’s dome light, even soaked to the skin, hair tangled, breathing hard, she was a vision. A vision.
She said, “You don’t stop. Whatever happens, you have to get back to the Acre. Even if I’m in trouble.”
It took me a second to process what she was saying. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
“Listen. Listen.” Her body was coiled with tension. She took my hands, twined our fingers together without unlocking her eyes from mine. “Someone has to warn the others, and there’s nobody but us to do it. Nobody else knows what’s happened.”
My whole mind rejected the idea, cringed at the thought of abandoning Noor for any reason. But I could conjure no more articulate an argument against it than “No.”
Her hand stole onto my leg. “I already cost V her life.” Her fingers dug in. “Don’t let me be the reason our friends die, too.”
My heart was beating in my throat. “You have to promise the same thing,” I said. “No stopping.”
Her eyes flicked downward and she nodded, an almost indiscernible movement. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I said.
It was a lie. I would never have left her behind.
She offered up the clicker. I hit the button. The garage door motor kicked on, complaining as it began to roll upward. My grandfather had backed the Caprice in, so we were facing the street, and the door opening was like the curtain’s rise at the start of a play.
My grandfather’s house was burning. The side yard was blackened. A hole smoked in the grass; another had been punched through a wall of the house, exposing the bathroom’s pink tiles.
I’m pretty sure I muttered, “Oh, shit,” and Noor said something about starting the engine, but a sudden, sharp pain in my gut demanded all my attention. It also told my eyes where to look: at the hole in the yard, where a black tongue was reaching up into the rain from a shifting pile of pink-tiled rubble.
Noor was staring, too, had followed my eyes to the pile.
“Jacob?” she said quietly. “I think it survived.”
The hollowgast rose from the rubble. It was enormously tall despite its hunched back, and it stretched and cricked its neck as if just waking from a nap rather than unburying itself from a house. Pulverized concrete had dusted it ghostly white—making it visible to Noor.
“Start the engine.” Noor was reaching over, shaking me. “The engine, Jacob!”
I twisted the key, then racked the shifter down to D and punched the gas. We lurched into the driveway, bottomed out in the gutter with an attention-grabbing scrape, and swerved into the street.
“I see it, I can see it, GO,” Noor shouted, body angled back toward my grandfather’s house.
I floored the gas pedal. The car’s engine howled with a fury that old, boatlike Chevy Caprices were never meant to have. It was too much power; the back wheels spun on the wet pavement as the rear end swung sideways.
The hollow was loping across the yard, nearly to the street now. It was even taller than the one I’d fought at the deadrisers’ loop in Gravehill, and spattered with impressionistic puffs of concrete dust and black blood.
“GO, GO, GO, GO!” Noor shouted. “Forward, not sideways!”
I let off the gas until the back tires stopped spinning, cut the wheel the other way, and eased down the pedal again.
“Right behind you—RIGHT behind you—”
We took off just as the hollowgast’s tongue tried to lasso our bumper, but it bounced off with a loud metal thwang. A moment later another of its tongues punched out the back window. It shattered, raining glass into the rear seat. We were tearing down the street now, and it was running after us, limping and injured but still fast.
Noor opened the glove box and rifled through it. She was looking for a weapon, or maybe a secret panel of James Bond–style buttons. But there were only registration papers and a pair of old reading glasses. We were going as fast as I dared, given the wet streets and fallen branches and uprooted yard ornaments that had made an obstacle course of the neighborhood—that and the endless circles of Circle Village, which was nothing but curves and curlicues and cul-de-sacs that kept trying to throw our fast-but-heavy car into retention ponds and the sides of houses, and I had to keep braking and turning and braking when I was dying, dying just to floor it. We were beginning to lose the hollow despite all that, but only because it was hurt, forced to use one tongue as a crutch.