A few hands shot up.
“And against?”
Suddenly there was a loud pop from the direction of the ambulance, and we all turned to see Miss Peregrine standing by as one of its rear tires hissed air. Miss Peregrine had voted with her beak — by stabbing it into the ambulance’s tire. Now no one could use it — not us, not injured persons — and there was no point in arguing or delaying any further.
“Well, that simplifies things,” said Millard. “We go on foot.”
“Miss Peregrine!” Bronwyn cried. “How could you?”
Ignoring Bronwyn’s indignation, Miss Peregrine hopped over to Melina, looked up at the pigeon on her shoulder, and screeched. The message was clear: Let’s go already!
What could we do? Time was wasting.
“Come with us,” Emma said to Sam. “If there’s any justice in the world, we’ll be somewhere safe before the night is through.”
“I told you, I won’t leave my sister behind,” Sam replied.
“You’re going to one of those places she can’t enter, aren’t you?”
“I–I don’t know,” Emma stammered. “It’s possible …”
“I don’t care either way,” Sam said coldly. “After what I just saw, I wouldn’t so much as cross the road with you.”
Emma drew back, going a bit pale. In a small voice she asked, “Why?”
“If even outcasts and downtrodden folk like yourselves can’t muster a bit of compassion for others,” she said, “then there’s no hope for this world.” And she turned away and carried Esme toward the ambulance.
Emma reacted as if she’d been slapped, her cheeks going red. She ran after Sam. “We don’t all think the way Enoch does! And as for our ymbryne, I’m sure she didn’t mean to do what she did!”
Sam spun to face her. “That was no accident! I’m glad my sister’s not like all of you. Wish to God I wasn’t.”
She turned away again, and this time Emma didn’t follow. With wounded eyes she watched Sam go, then slouched after the others. Somehow the olive branch she’d extended had turned into a snake and bitten her.
Bronwyn peeled off her sweater and set it down on the rubble. “Next time bombs start falling, have your sister wear this,” she called to Sam. “It’ll keep her safer than any bathtub.”
Sam said nothing; didn’t even look. She was bending over the ambulance driver, who was sitting up now and mumbling, “I had the queerest dream …”
“That was a stupid thing to do,” Enoch said to Bronwyn.
“Now you don’t have a sweater.”
“Shut your fat gob,” Bronwyn replied. “If you’d ever done a nice thing for another person, you might understand.”
“I did do something nice for another person,” Enoch said, “and it nearly got us eaten by hollows!”
We mumbled goodbyes that went unreturned and slipped quietly into the shadows. Melina took the pigeon from her shoulder and tossed it skyward. It flew a short distance before a string she’d tied around its foot snapped taut and it hovered, caught in the air, like a dog straining at its lead. “Miss Wren’s this way,” Melina said, nodding in the direction the bird was pulling, and we followed the girl and her pigeon friend down the alley.
I was about to assume hollow-watch, my now-customary position near the head of the group, when something made me glance back at the sisters. I turned in time to see Sam lift Esme into the ambulance, then bend forward to plant a kiss on each of her scraped knees. I wondered what would happen to them. Later, Millard would tell me that the fact that none of them had ever heard of Sam — and someone with such a unique peculiarity would’ve been well known — meant she probably had not survived the war.
The whole episode had really gotten to Emma. I don’t know why it was so important for her to prove to a stranger that we were good-hearted, when we knew ourselves to be — but the suggestion that we were anything less than angels walking the earth, that our natures were more complexly shaded, seemed to bother her. “They don’t understand,” she kept saying.
Then again, I thought, maybe they do.
CHAPTER XI
So it had come to this: everything depended on a pigeon. Whether we would end the night in the womblike safety of an ymbryne’s care or half chewed in the churning black of a hollow’s guts; whether Miss Peregrine would be saved or we’d wander lost through this hellscape until her clock ran out; whether I would live to see my home or my parents again — it all depended on one scrawny, peculiar pigeon.
I walked at the front of the group, feeling for hollows, but it was really the pigeon who led us, tugging on its leash like a bloodhound after a scent. We turned left when the bird flew left, and right when it jerked right, obedient as sheep even when it meant fumbling down streets cratered with ankle-breaking bomb holes or bristling with the bones of dismembered buildings, their jagged iron spear tips lurking dimly in the wavering fire glow, angled at our throats.
Coming down from the terrifying events of that evening, I’d reached a new low of exhaustion. My head tingled strangely. My feet dragged. The rumble of bombs had quieted and the sirens had finally wound down, and I wondered if all that apocalyptic noise had been keeping me awake. Now the smoky air was alive with subtler sounds: water gushing from broken mains, the whine of a trapped dog, hoarse voices moaning for help. Occasionally fellow travelers would materialize out of the dark, wraithlike figures escaped from some lower world, eyes shining with fear and suspicion, clutching random things in their arms — radios, looted silver, a gilt box, a funerary urn. Dead bearing the dead.
We came to a T in the road and stopped, the pigeon deliberating between left and right. The girl murmured encouragements: “Come on, Winnie. There’s a good pigeon. Show us the way.”
Enoch leaned in and whispered, “If you don’t find Miss Wren, I will personally roast you on a spit.”
The bird leapt into the air, urging left.
Melina glowered at Enoch. “You’re an ass,” she said.
“I get results,” he replied.
Eventually we arrived at an underground station. The pigeon led us through its arched entry into a ticket lobby, and I was about to say We’re taking the subway — smart bird, when I realized the lobby was deserted and the ticket booth shuttered. Though it didn’t look like trains would be visiting this station anytime soon, we forged ahead regardless, through an unchained gate, along a hallway lined with peeling notices and chipped white tiles, to a deep staircase where we spiraled down and down into the city’s humming, electric-lit belly.
At each landing, we had to step around sleeping people wrapped in blankets: lone sleepers at first, then groups lying like scattered matchsticks, and then, as we reached bottom, an unbroken human tide that swept across the underground platform — hundreds of people squeezed between a wall and the tracks, curled on the floor, sprawled on benches, sunk into folding chairs. Those who weren’t sleeping rocked babies in their arms, read paperbacks, played cards, prayed. They weren’t waiting for a train; no trains were coming. They were refugees from the bombs, and this was their shelter.
I tried sensing for hollows, but there were too many faces, too many shadows. Luck, if we had any left, would have to sustain us for a while.
Now what?
We needed directions from the pigeon, but it seemed briefly confused — like me, it was probably overwhelmed by the crowd — so we stood and waited, the breaths and snores and mumbles of the sleepers murmuring weirdly around us.