A pair of strong arms caught me—Bronwyn’s—and set my feet on the floor. I thanked her, my heart pounding.
“What happened up there?” asked Bronwyn. “Did you catch the pigeon?”
“We got it,” I said as Emma and Horace reached the bottom, and a cheer went up among our friends. “That’s Melina,” I said, pointing up at her, and that was all the time for introductions we had. Melina was still at the top of the steps, fooling with something. “Come on!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Buying us time!” she shouted back, and then she pulled shut and locked a wooden lid that capped the well, closing out the last rays of light. As she climbed down in darkness, I explained about the hollows that were chasing us. In my panicked state, this came out as “GO NOW RUN HOLLOWS NOW,” which was effective if not terribly articulate, and threw everyone into hysterics.
“How can we run if we can’t see?!” Enoch shouted. “Light a flame, Emma!”
She’d been holding off because of my warning back in the attic.
Now seemed like a good time to reinforce that, so I grabbed her arm and said, “Don’t! They’ll be able to pinpoint us too easily!” Our best hope, I thought, was to lose them in this forking maze of tunnels.
“But we can’t just run blindly in the dark!” said Emma.
“Of course,” said the younger echolocator.
“We can,” said the older.
Melina stumbled toward their voices. “Boys! You’re alive! It’s me—it’s Melina!”
Joel-and-Peter said:
“We thought you were—”
“Dead every last—”
“One of you.”
“Everyone link hands!” Melina said. “Let the boys lead the way!”
So I took Melina’s hand in the dark and Emma took mine, then she felt for Bronwyn’s, and so on until we’d formed a human chain with the blind brothers in the lead. Then Emma gave the word and the boys took off at an easy run, plunging us into the black.
We forked left. Splashed through puddles of standing water. Then from the tunnel behind us came an echoing crash that could only have meant one thing: the hollows had smashed through the well door.
“They’re in!” I shouted.
I could almost feel them narrowing their bodies, wriggling down into the shaft. Once they made it to level ground and could run, they’d overtake us in no time. We’d only passed one split in the tunnels—not enough to lose them. Not nearly enough.
Which is why what Millard said next struck me as patently insane: “Stop! Everyone stop!”
The blind boys listened to him. We piled up behind them, tripping and skidding to a halt.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I shouted. “Run!”
“So sorry,” Millard said, “but this just occurred to me—one of us will have to pass through the loop exit before the echolocators or the girl do, or they will cross into the present and we into 1940, and we’ll be separated. For them to travel to 1940 with us, one of us has to go first and open the way.”
“You didn’t come from the present?” Melina said, confused.
“From 1940, like he said,” Emma replied. “It’s raining bombs out there, though. You might want to stay behind.”
“Nice try,” said Melina, “you ain’t getting rid of me that easy. It’s got to be worse in the present—wights everywhere! That’s why I never left Miss Thrush’s loop.”
Emma stepped forward and pulled me with her. “Fine! We’ll go first!”
I stuck out my free arm, feeling blindly in the dark. “But I can’t see a thing!”
The elder echolocator said, “It’s just twenty paces ahead there, you—”
“Can’t miss it,” said the younger.
So we plodded ahead, waving our hands in front of us. I kicked something with my foot and stumbled. My left shoulder scraped the wall.
“Keep it straight!” Emma said, pulling me to the right.
My stomach lurched. I could feel it: the hollows had made it down the well shaft. Now, even if they couldn’t sense us, there was a fifty-fifty chance they’d choose the right spur of the tunnel and find us anyway.
The time for sneaking around was over. We had to run.
“Screw it,” I said. “Emma, give me a light!”
“Gladly!” She let my hand go and made a flame so large I felt the hair on the right side of my head singe.
I saw the transition point right away. It was just ahead of us, marked by a vertical line painted on the tunnel wall. We took off running for it in a mob.
The moment we passed it, I felt a pressure in my ears. We were back in 1940.
We bolted through the catacombs, Emma’s fire casting manic shadows across the walls, the blind boys clicking loudly with their tongues and shouting out “Left!” or “Right!” when we came to splits in the tunnel.
We passed the stack of coffins, the landslide of bones. Finally we returned to the dead end and the ladder to the crypt. I shoved Horace up ahead of me, then Enoch, and then Olive took off her shoes and floated up.
“We’re taking too long!” I shouted.
Down the passage I could feel them coming. Could hear their tongues pounding the stone floor, propelling them forward. Could picture their jaws beginning to drip black goo in anticipation of a kill.
Then I saw them. A blur of dark motion in the distance.
I screamed, “Go!” and leapt onto the ladder, the last one to climb it. When I was near the top, Bronwyn reached down her arm and yanked me up the last few rungs, and then I was in the crypt with everyone else.
Groaning loudly, Bronwyn picked up the stone slab that topped Christopher Wren’s tomb and dropped it back in place. Not two seconds later, something slammed violently against the underside of it, making the heavy slab leap. It wouldn’t hold the hollows for long—not two of them.
They were so close. Alarms blared inside me, my stomach aching like I’d drunk acid. We dashed up the spiral staircase and into the nave. The cathedral was dark now, the only illumination a weird orange glow eking through the stained-glass windows. I thought for a moment it was the last strains of sunset, but then, as we dashed toward the exit, I caught a glimpse of the sky through the broken roof.
Night had fallen. The bombs were falling still, thudding like an irregular heartbeat.
We ran outside.
From where we stood, arrested in awe on the cathedral steps, it looked as if the whole city had caught fire. The sky was a panorama of orange flame bright enough to read by. The square where we’d chased pigeons was a smoking hole in the cobblestones. The sirens droned on, a soprano counterpoint to the bombs’ relentless bass, their pitch so eerily human it sounded like every soul in London had taken to their rooftops to cry out collective despair. Then awe gave way to fear and the urgency of self-preservation, and we rushed down the debris-strewn steps into the street—past the ruined square, around a double-decker bus that looked like it had been crushed in the fist of an angry giant—running I knew not where, nor cared, so long as it was away from the Feeling that grew stronger and sicker inside me with each passing moment.
I looked back at the telekinetic girl, pulling the blind brothers along by their hands while they clicked with their tongues. I thought of telling her to let the pigeon go so we could follow it—but what use would it be to find Miss Wren now, while hollows were chasing us? We’d reach her only to be slaughtered at her doorstep, and we’d put her life in danger, too. No, we had to lose the hollows first. Or better yet, kill them.
A man in a metal hat stuck his head out of a doorway and shouted, “You are advised to take cover!” then ducked back inside.
Sure, I thought, but where? Maybe we could hide in the debris and the chaos around us, and with so much noise and distraction everywhere, the hollows would pass us by. But we were still too close to them, our trail too fresh. I warned my friends not to use their abilities, no matter what, and Emma and I led them zigzagging through the streets, hoping this would make us harder to track.