I took another step forward, and he raised his head to look at me. His face was a stubble of caked blood, his one white eye shot through with red, spit flecking the corners of his mouth.

He rose unsteadily, the cage in one hand.

"Put it down."

He bent over as if to comply but faked away from me and tried to run. I shouted and gave chase, but as soon as he disappeared around the lamp housing I saw the glow of Emma's fire flare across the concrete. Golan came howling back toward me, his hair smoking and one arm covering his face.

"Stop!" I screamed at him, and he realized he was trapped. He raised the cage, shielding himself, and gave it a vicious shake. The birds screeched and nipped at his hand through the bars.

"Is this what you want?" Golan shouted. "Go ahead, burn me! The birds will burn, too! Shoot me and I'll throw them over the side!"

"Not if I shoot you in the head!"

He laughed. "You couldn't fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I'm intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It'd give you nightmares."

I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing; the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he'd been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I'd already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might've cost the ymbryes their lives.

The giant lamp spun past, blasting us with light, turning us into glowing white cutouts. Golan, who was facing it, grimaced and looked away. Another wasted opportunity, I thought.

"Just put it down and come with us," I said. "Nobody else has to get hurt."

"I don't know," Emma said. "If Millard doesn't make it, I might reconsider that."

"You want to kill me?" Golan said. "Fine, get it over with. But you'll only be delaying the inevitable, not to mention making things worse for yourselves. We know how to find you now. More like me are coming, and I can guarantee the collateral damage they do will make what I did to your friend seem downright charitable."

"Get it over with?" Emma said, her flame sending a little pulse of sparks skyward. "Who said it would be quick?"

"I told you, I'll kill them," he said, drawing the cage to his chest.

She took a step toward him. "I'm eighty-eight years old," she said. "Do I look like I need a pair of babysitters?" Her expression was steely, unreadable. "I can't tell you how long we've been dying to get out from under that woman's wing. I swear, you'd be doing us a favor."

Golan swiveled his head back and forth, nervously sizing us up. Is she serious? For a moment he seemed genuinely frightened, but then he said, "You're full of shit."

Emma rubbed her palms together and pulled them slowly apart, drawing out a noose of flame. "Let's find out."

I wasn't sure how far Emma would take this, but I had to step in before the birds went up in flames or were sent tumbling over the rail.

"Tell us what you want with those ymbrynes, and maybe she'll go easy on you," I said.

"We only want to finish what we started," Golan said. "That's all we've ever wanted."

"You mean the experiment," Emma said. "You tried it once, and look what happened. You turned yourselves into monsters!"

"Yes," he said, "but what an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go." He smiled. "This time we'll be harnessing the talents of all the world's best time manipulators, like these two ladies here. We won't fail again. We've had a hundred years to figure out what went wrong. Turns out all we needed was a bigger reaction!"

"A bigger reaction?" I said. "Last time you blew up half of Siberia!"

"If you must fail," he said grandly, "fail spectacularly!"

I remembered Horace's prophetic dream of ash clouds and scorched earth, and I realized what he'd been seeing. If the wights and hollows failed again, this time they'd destroy a lot more than five hundred miles of empty forest. And if they succeeded, and turned themselves into the deathless demigods they'd always dreamed of becoming ... I shuddered to imagine it. Living under them would be a hell all its own.

The light came around and blinded Golan again—I tensed, ready to lunge—but the moment sped by too quickly.

"It doesn't matter," Emma said. "Kidnap all the ymbrynes you want. They'll never help you."

"Yes, they will. They'll do it or we'll kill them one by one. And if that doesn't work, we'll kill you one by one, and make them watch."

"You're insane," I told him.

The birds began to panic and screech. Golan shouted over them.

"No! What's really insane is how you peculiars hide from the world when you could rule it—succumb to death when you could dominate it—and let the common genetic trash of the human race drive you underground when you could so easily make them your slaves, as they rightly should be!" He drove home every sentence with another shake of the cage. "That's insane!"

"Stop it!" Emma shouted.

"So you do care!" He shook the cage even harder. Suddenly, the little red light attached to its bars began to glow twice as bright, and Golan whipped his head around and searched the darkness behind him. Then he looked back at Emma and said, "You want them? Here!" and he pulled back and swung the cage at her face.

She cried out and ducked. Like a discus thrower, Golan continued the swing until the cage sailed over her head, then released. It flew out of his hands and over the rail, tumbling end over end into the night.

I cursed and Emma screamed and threw herself against the rail, clawing at the air as the cage fell toward the sea. In that moment of confusion, Golan leapt and knocked me to the ground. He slammed a fist into my stomach and another into my chin.

I was dizzy and couldn't breathe. He grabbed for the gun, and it took every bit of my strength to keep him from snatching it. Because he wanted it so badly, I knew it must've been loaded. I would've thrown it over the rail, but he almost had it and I couldn't let go. Emma was screaming bastard, you bastard, and then her hands, gloved in flame, came from behind and seized him around the neck.

I heard Golan's flesh singe like a cold steak on a hot grill. He howled and rolled off me, his thin hair going up in flame, and then his hands were around Emma's throat, as though he didn't mind burning as long as he could choke the life out of her. I jumped to my feet, held the gun in both hands, and pointed it.

I had, just for a moment, a clear shot. I tried to empty my mind and focus on steadying my arm, creating an imaginary line that extended from my shoulder through the sight to my target—a man's head. No, not a man, but a corruption of one. A thing. A force that had arranged the murder of my grandfather and exploded all that I'd humbly called a life, poorly lived though it may have been, and carried me here to this place and this moment, in much the way less corrupt and violent forces had done my living and deciding for me since I was old enough to decide anything. Relax your hands, breathe in, hold it. But now I had a chance to force back, a slim nothing of a chance that I could already feel slipping away.

Now squeeze.

The pistol bucked in my hands and its report sounded like the earth breaking open, so tremendous and sudden that I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, everything seemed strangely frozen. Though Golan stood behind Emma with her arms locked in a hold, wrestling her toward the railing, it was as if they'd been cast in bronze. Had the ymbrynes turned human again and worked their magic on us? But then everything came unstuck and Emma wrenched her arms away and Golan began to totter backward, and he stumbled and sat heavily on the rail.

Gaping at me in surprise, he opened his mouth to speak but found he could not. He clapped his hands over the penny-sized hole I'd made in his throat, blood lacing through his fingers and running down his arms, and then the strength went out of him and he fell back, and he was gone.

The moment Golan disappeared from view, he was forgotten. Emma pointed out to sea and shouted, "There, there!" Following her finger and squinting into the distance I could barely pick out the pulse of a red LED bobbing on the waves. Then we were scrambling to the hatch and sprinting down and down the endless seesawing staircase, hopeless that we could reach the cage before it sank but hysterical to try to anyway.

We tore outside to find Millard wearing a tourniquet and Bronwyn by his side. He shouted something I didn't quite hear, but it was enough to assure me he was alive. I grabbed Emma's shoulder and said, "The boat!" pointing to where the stolen canoe had been lashed to a rock, but it was too far away, on the wrong side of the lighthouse, and there was no time. Emma pulled me instead toward the open sea, and, running, we dashed ourselves into it.

I hardly felt the cold. All I could think about was reaching the cage before it disappeared beneath the waves. We tore at the water and sputtered and choked as black swells slapped our faces. It was difficult to tell how far away the beacon was, just a single point of light in a surging ocean of dark. It bobbed and fell and came and went, and twice we lost sight of it and had to stop, searching frantically before spotting it again.

The strong current was carrying the cage out to sea, and us with it. If we didn't reach it soon, our muscles would fail and we'd drown. I kept this morbid thought to myself for as long as I could, but when the beacon disappeared a third time and we looked for it so long we couldn't even be sure what section of the rolling black sea it had disappeared from, I shouted, "We have to go back!"

Emma wouldn't listen. She swam ahead of me, farther out to sea. I grasped at her scissoring feet but she kicked me off.

"It's gone! We aren't going to find them!"

"Shut up, shut up!" she cried, and I could tell from her labored breaths that she was as exhausted as I was. "Just shut up and look!"

I grabbed her and shouted in her face and she kicked at me, and when I wouldn't let go and she couldn't force me to, she began to cry, just wordless howls of despair.

I tried to drag her back toward the lighthouse, but she was like a stone in the water, pulling me down. "You have to swim!" I shouted. "Swim or we'll drown!"

And then I saw it—the faintest blink of red light. It was close, just below the surface. At first I didn't say anything, afraid I'd imagined it, but then it blinked a second time.

Emma whooped and shouted. It looked like the cage had landed on another wreck—how else could it have come to rest so shallowly?—and because it had only just sunk, I told myself it was possible the birds were still alive.

We swam and prepared to dive for the cage, though I didn't know where the breath would come from, we had so little left. Then, strangely, the cage seemed to rise toward us.

"What's happening?" I shouted. "Is that a wreck?"

"Can't be. There are none over here!"

"Then what the hell is that?"

It looked like a whale about to surface, long and massive and gray, or some ghost ship rising from its grave, and there erupted a sudden and powerful swell that came up from below and pushed us away. We tried to paddle against it but had no more luck than flotsam caught in a tidal wave, and then it thudded against our feet and we were rising, too, riding its back.

It came out of the water beneath us, hissing and clanking like some giant mechanical monster. We were caught in a sudden rush of foaming surf that raced off it in every direction, thrown hard onto a surface of metal grates. We hooked our fingers through the grates to keep from being washed into the sea. I squinted through the salt spray and saw that the cage had come to rest between what looked like two fins jutting from the monster's back, one smaller and one larger. And then the lighthouse beam swept past, and in its gleam I realized they weren't fins at all but a conning tower and a giant bolted-down gun. This thing we were riding wasn't a monster or a wreck or a whale—

"It's a U-boat!" I shouted. That it had risen right beneath our feet was no coincidence. It had to be what Golan was waiting for.

Emma was already on her feet and sprinting across the rolling deck toward the cage. I scrambled to stand. As I began to run a wave flashed over the deck and knocked us both down.

I heard a shout and looked up to see a man in a gray uniform rise from a hatch in the conning tower and level a gun at us.

Bullets rained down, hammering the deck. The cage was too far away—we'd be torn to pieces before we could reach it—but I could see that Emma was about to try anyway.

I ran and tackled her and we tumbled sideways off the deck and into the water. The black sea closed above us. Bullets peppered the water, leaving trails of bubbles in their wake.

When we surfaced again, she grabbed me and screamed, "Why did you do that? I nearly had them!"

"He was about to kill you!" I said, wrestling away—and then it occurred to me that she hadn't even seen him, she'd been so focused on the cage, so I pointed up at the deck, where the gunner was striding toward it. He picked the cage up and rattled it. Its door hung open, and I thought I saw movement inside—some reason for hope—and then the lighthouse beam washed over everything. I saw the gunner's face full in the light, his mouth curled into a leering grin, his eyes depthless and blank. He was a wight.

He reached into the cage and pulled out a single sodden bird. From the conning tower, another soldier whistled to him, and he ran back toward the hatch with it.

The sub began to rattle and hiss. The water around us churned as if boiling.

"Swim or it'll suck us down with it!" I shouted to Emma. But she hadn't heard me—her eyes were locked elsewhere, on a patch of dark water near the stern of the boat.

She swam for it. I tried to stop her but she fought me off. Then, over the whine of the sub, I heard it—a high, shrieking call. Miss Peregrine!

We found her bobbing in the waves, struggling to keep her head above water, one wing flapping, the other broken looking. Emma scooped her up. I screamed that we had to go.

We swam away with what little strength we had. Behind us, a whirlpool was opening up, all the water displaced by the sub rushing back to fill the void as it sank. The sea was consuming itself and trying to consume us, too, but we had with us now a screeching winged symbol of victory, or half a victory at least, and she gave us the strength to fight the unnatural current. Then we heard Bronwyn shouting our names, and our brawny friend came crashing through the waves to tow us back to safety.

* * *

We lay on the rocks beneath the clearing sky, gasping for air and trembling with exhaustion. Millard and Bronwyn had so many questions, but we had no breath to answer them. They had seen Golan's body fall and the submarine rise and sink and Miss Peregrine come out of the water but not Miss Avocet; they understood what they needed to. They hugged us until we stopped shaking, and Bronwyn tucked the headmistress under her shirt for warmth. Once we'd recovered a little, we retrieved Emma's canoe and pushed off toward the shore.

When we got there, the children all waded into the shallows to meet us.

"We heard shooting!"

"What was that strange boat?"

"Where's Miss Peregrine?"

We climbed out of the rowboat, and Bronwyn raised her shirt to reveal the bird nuzzled there. The children crowded around, and Miss Peregrine lifted her beak and crowed at them to show that she was tired but all right. A cheer went up.

"You did it!" Hugh shouted.

Olive danced a little jig and sang, "The Bird, the Bird, the Bird! Emma and Jacob saved the Bird!"

But the celebration was brief. Miss Avocet's absence was quickly noted, as was Millard's alarming condition. His tourniquet was tight, but he'd lost a lot of blood and was weakening. Enoch gave him his coat, Fiona offered her woolen hat.

"We'll take you to see the doctor in town," Emma said to him.

"Nonsense," Millard replied. "The man's never laid eyes on an invisible boy, and he wouldn't know what to do with one if he did. He'd either treat the wrong limb or run away screaming."

"It doesn't matter if he runs away screaming," Emma said. "Once the loop resets he won't remember a thing."

"Look around you. The loop should've reset an hour ago."

Millard was right—the skies were quiet, the battle had ended, but rolling drifts of bomb smoke still mixed with the clouds.

"That's not good," Enoch said, and everyone got quiet.

"In any case," Millard continued, "all the supplies I need are in the house. Just give me a bolt of Laudanum and swab the wound with alcohol. It's only the fleshy part anyway. In three days I'll be right as rain."

"But it's still bleeding," Bronwyn said, pointing out red droplets that dotted the sand beneath him.

"Then tie the damn tourniquet tighter!"

She did, and Millard gasped in a way that made everyone cringe, then fainted into her arms.

"Is he all right?" Claire asked.

"Just blacked out is all," said Enoch. "He ain't as fit as he pretends to be."

"What do we do now?"

"Ask Miss Peregrine!" Olive said.

"Right. Put her down so she can change back," said Enoch. "She can't very well tell us what to do while she's still a bird."

So Bronwyn set her on a dry patch of sand, and we all stood back and waited. Miss Peregrine hopped a few times and flapped her good wing and then swiveled her feathered head around and blinked at us—but that was it. She remained a bird.

"Maybe she wants a little privacy," Emma suggested. "Let's turn our backs."

So we did, forming a ring around her. "It's safe now, Miss P," said Olive. "No one's looking!"

After a minute, Hugh snuck a peek and said, "Nope, still a bird."

"Maybe she's too tired and cold," Claire said, and enough of the others agreed this was plausible that it was decided we would go back to the house, treat Millard with what supplies we had, and hope that with some time to rest, both the headmistress and her loop would return to normal.

Chapter 11

We marched up the steep trail and across the ridge like a company of war-weary veterans, single file, heads down, Bronwyn carrying Millard in her arms and Miss Peregrine riding the nestlike crown of Fiona's hair. The landscape was gouged with smoking craters, fresh-turned earth thrown everywhere as if some giant dog had been digging at it. We all wondered what awaited us back at the house, but no one dared to ask.

We had our answer even before clearing the forest. Enoch's foot kicked something, and he bent down to look. It was half a charred brick.

Panic broke out. The children began to sprint down the path. When they reached the lawn, the younger ones broke out in tears. There was smoke everywhere. The bomb had not come to rest atop Adam's finger, as it usually did, but had split him straight down the middle and exploded. The back corner of the house had been reduced to a slumped and smoking ruin. Small fires burned in the charred shell of two rooms. Where Adam had been was a raw crater deep enough to bury a person upright. It was easy now to picture what this place would one day become: that sad and desecrated wreck I had first discovered weeks ago. The nightmare house.

Miss Peregrine leapt from Fiona's hair and began to race around on the scorched grass, squawking in alarm.

"Headmistress, what happened?" Olive said. "Why hasn't the changeover come?"

Miss Peregrine could only screech in reply. She seemed as confused and frightened as the rest of us.

"Please turn back!" begged Claire, kneeling before her.

Miss Peregrine flapped and jumped and seemed to be straining herself, but still couldn't shift her shape. The children crowded around in concern.

"Something's wrong," Emma said. "If she could turn human, she would've done it by now."

"Perhaps that's why the loop slipped," Enoch suggested. "Remember that old story about Miss Kestrel, when she was thrown from her bicycle in a road accident? She knocked her head and stayed a kestrel for a whole entire week. That's when her loop slipped."

"What's that got to do with Miss Peregrine?"

Enoch sighed. "Maybe she's only injured her head and we just need to wait a week for her to come to her senses."

"A speeding lorry's one thing," Emma said. "Being abused by wights is quite another. There's no knowing what that bastard did to Miss Peregrine before we got to her."

"Wights? As in plural?"

"It was wights who took Miss Avocet," I said.

"How do you know that?" demanded Enoch.

"They were working with Golan, weren't they? And I saw the eyes of the one who shot at us. There's no question."

"Then Miss Avocet's as good as dead," said Hugh. "They'll kill her for sure."

"Maybe not," I replied. "At least not right away."

"If there's one thing I know about wights," said Enoch, "it's that they kill peculiars. It's their nature. It's what they do."

"No, Jacob's right," said Emma. "Before that wight died, he told us why they've been abducting so many ymbrynes. They're going to force them to re-create the reaction that made the hollows in the first place—only bigger. Much bigger."

I heard someone gasp. Everyone else fell silent. I looked around for Miss Peregrine and saw her perched forlornly on the edge of Adam's crater.

"We've got to stop them," Hugh said. "We've got to find out where they're taking the ymbrynes."

"How?" said Enoch. "Follow a submarine?"

Behind me a throat cleared loudly, and we turned to see Horace sitting cross-legged on the ground. "I know where they're going," he said quietly.

"What do you mean, you know?"

"Never mind how he knows, he knows," said Emma. "Where are they taking her, Horace?"

He shook his head. "I don't know the name," he said, "but I've seen it."

"Then draw it," I said.

He thought for a moment and then rose stiffly. Looking like a beggar evangelist in his torn black suit, he shuffled to an ash pile that had spilled from the cracked-open house and bent to gather a palm full of soot. Then, in the soft light of the moon, he began to paint on a broken wall with broad strokes.

We gathered around to watch. He made a row of bold vertical stripes topped with thin loops, like bars and razor wire. To one side was a dark forest. There was snow on the ground, rendered in black. And that was all.

When it was done, he staggered back and sat down hard in the grass, a dull distant look in his eyes. Emma took him gently by the shoulder and said, "Horace, what more do you know about this place?"

"It's somewhere cold."

Bronwyn stepped forward to study the marks Horace had made. She held Olive in the crook of her arm, the little girl's head resting sweetly on her shoulder. "Looks like a jail to me," said Bronwyn.

Olive raised her head. "Well?" came her small voice. "When do we go?"

"Go where?" Enoch said, tossing up his hands. "That's just a lot of squiggles!"

"It's somewhere," Emma said, turning to face him.

"We can't simply go someplace snowy and look for a prison."

"And we can't very well stay here."

"Why not?"

"Look at the state of this place. Look at the headmistress. We had a damn good run here, but it's over."

Enoch and Emma went back and forth for a while. People took sides. Enoch's argued that they'd been too long out of the world, that they'd get snared in the war or caught by hollows if they left, that it was better to take their chances here, where at least they knew the territory. The others insisted that the war and the hollows had come to them now, and they had no choice. The hollows and wights would return for Miss Peregrine, and in ever-greater numbers. And there was Miss Peregrine herself to consider.

"We'll find another ymbryne," Emma suggested. "If anyone will know how to help the headmistress, it'll be one of her friends."

"But what if all the other loops have slipped too?" said Hugh. "What if all the ymbrynes have already been kidnapped?"

"We can't think that way. There must be some left."

"Emma's right," Millard said, lying on the ground with a chunk of broken masonry under his head for a pillow. "If the alternative is to wait and just hope—that no more hollows come, that the headmistress gets better—I say that's no alternative at all."

The dissenters were finally shamed into agreement. The house would be abandoned. Belongings would be packed. A few boats would be requisitioned from the harbor and pressed into service, and in the morning everyone would go.

I asked Emma how they were going to navigate. After all, none the children had been off the island in nearly eighty years, and Miss Peregrine couldn't speak or fly.

"There's a map," she told me, turning her head slowly to look at the smoking house. "If it hasn't burned, that is."

I volunteered to help her find it. Wrapping wet cloths over our faces, we ventured into the house, entering through the collapsed wall. The windows were shattered, the air hung with smoke, but by the bright light of Emma's hand-flame we found our way to the study. All the shelves had fallen like dominoes, but we shoved them aside and searched through the books spilled across the floor, crouching low. As luck would have it, the book was easy to find: it was the largest one in the library. Emma yelped with joy and held it up.

On the way out, we found alcohol and Laudanum and proper bandages for Millard. Once we'd helped clean and dress his wound, we sat down to examine the book. It was more atlas than map, bound in quilted leather dyed a deep burgundy, each page drawn carefully on what looked like parchment. It was very fine and very old, and big enough to fill Emma's lap.

"It's called the Map of Days," she said. "It's got every loop ever known to exist." The page she'd opened to appeared to be a map of Turkey, though no roads were marked and no borders indicated. Instead, the map was scattered with tiny spirals, which I took to be the location of loops. At the center of each was a unique symbol that corresponded to a legend at the bottom of the page, where the symbols reappeared next to a list of numbers separated by dashes. I pointed to one that read 29-3-316 / ?-?-399 and said, "What is this, some kind of code?"

Emma traced it with her finger. "This loop was the twenty-ninth of March, 316 A.D. It existed until sometime in the year 399, though the day and month are unknown."

"What happened in 399?"

She shrugged. "It doesn't say."

I reached across her and turned to a map of Greece, even more clustered with spirals and numbers. "But what's the point of listing all these?" I said. "How would you even get to these ancient loops?"

"By leapfrogging," said Millard. "It's a highly complex and dangerous undertaking, but by leapfrogging from one loop to another—a day fifty years in the past, for instance—then you'll find you have access to a whole range of loops that have ceased to exist in the last fifty years. Should you have the wherewithal to travel to them, within those you'll find still other loops, and so on exponentially."

"That's time travel," I said, astonished. "Real time travel."

"I suppose so, yes."

"So this place," I said, pointing to Horace's ash painting on the wall. "We wouldn't just have to figure out where it is, but when, too?"

"I'm afraid so. And if Miss Avocet is indeed being held by wights, who are notoriously adept at leapfrogging, then it's extremely likely that the place she and the other ymbrynes are being taken is somewhere in the past. That will make them all the more difficult to find, and getting there all the more dangerous. The locations of historical loops are well known to our enemies, who tend to lurk near the entrances."

"Well then," I said, "it's a good thing I'm coming with you."

Emma spun to look at me. "Oh, that's wonderful!" she cried, and hugged me. "Are you certain?"

I told her I was. Tired as they were, the children whistled and clapped. Some embraced me. Even Enoch shook my hand. But when I looked at Emma again, her smile had faded.

"What's the matter?" I said.

She shifted uncomfortably. "There's something you should know," she said, "and I'm afraid it'll make you not want to come with us."

"It won't," I assured her.

"When we leave here, this loop will close behind us. It's possible you may never be able to return to the time you came from. At least, not easily."

"There's nothing for me there," I said quickly. "Even if I could go back, I'm not sure I'd want to."

"You say that now. I need you to be sure."

I nodded, then stood.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"For a walk."

I didn't go far, just around the perimeter of the neat yard in a slow shuffle, watching the sky, clear now, a billion stars spread across it. Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.

I came to the place where the path emerged from the woods. In one direction lay home and everything I knew, unmysterious and ordinary and safe.

Except it wasn't. Not really. Not any more. The monsters had murdered Grandpa Portman, and they had come after me. Sooner or later, they would again. Would I come home one day to find my dad bleeding to death on the floor? My mom? In the other direction, the children were gathering in excited little knots, plotting and planning, for the first time any of them could remember, for the future.

I walked back to Emma, still poring over her massive book. Miss Peregrine was perched next to her, tapping with her beak here and there on the map. Emma looked up as I approached.

"I'm sure," I said.

She smiled. "I'm glad."

"There's just one thing I have to do before I go."

* * *

I made it back to town just before dawn. The rain had finally eased, and the beginning of a blue day was percolating on the horizon. The main path looked like an arm with the veins stripped out, long slashes where flooding had washed the gravel away.

I walked into the pub and through the empty bar and up to our rooms. The shades were drawn and my father's door was closed, which was a relief because I hadn't yet figured out how to say what I needed to tell him. Instead I sat down with pen and paper and wrote him a letter.

I tried to explain everything. I wrote about the peculiar children and the hollows and how all of Grandpa Portman's stories had turned out to be true. I told him what had happened to Miss Peregrine and Miss Avocet and tried to make him understand why I had to go. I begged him not to worry.

Then I stopped and read over what I'd written. It was no good. He would never believe it. He'd think I'd lost my mind the way Grandpa had, or that I'd run away or been abducted or taken a nosedive off the cliffs. Either way, I was about to ruin his life. I wadded up the paper and threw it in the trash.

"Jacob?"

I turned to see my father leaning in the doorjamb, bleary-eyed, hair tangled, dressed in a mud-splashed shirt and jeans.

"Hi, Dad."

"I'm going to ask you a simple, straightforward question," he said, "and I'd like a simple, straightforward answer. Where were you last night?" I could tell he was struggling to maintain his composure.

I decided I was done lying. "I'm fine, Dad. I was with my friends."

It was like I'd pulled the pin on a grenade.

"YOUR FRIENDS ARE IMAGINARY!" he shouted. He came toward me, his face turning red. "I wish your mother and I had never let that crackpot therapist talk us into bringing you out here, because it has been an unmitigated disaster! You just lied to me for the last time! Now get in your room and start packing. We're on the next ferry!"

"Dad?"

"And when we get home, you're not leaving the house until we find a psychiatrist who's not a complete jackass!"

"Dad!"

I wondered for a moment if I would have to run from him. I pictured my dad holding me down, calling for help, loading me onto the ferry with my arms locked in a straightjacket.

"I'm not coming with you," I said.

His eyes narrowed and he cocked his head, as if he hasn't heard properly. I was about to repeat myself when there was a knock at the door.

"Go away!" my dad shouted.

The knock came again, more insistent this time. He stormed over and flung it open, and there at the top of the stairs stood Emma, a tiny ball of blue flame dancing above her hand. Next to her was Olive.

"Hullo," Olive said. "We're here to see Jacob."

He stared at them, baffled. "What is this ..."

The girls edged past him into the room.

"What are you doing here?" I hissed at them.

"We only wanted to introduce ourselves," Emma replied, flashing a big smile at my dad. "We've come to know your son rather well of late, so we thought it only proper that we should pay a friendly call."

"Okay," my father said, his eyes darting between them.

"He's really a fine boy," said Olive. "So brave!"

"And handsome!" Emma added, winking at me. She began to roll the flame between her hands like a toy. My father stared at it, hypnotized.

"Y-yes," he stammered. "He sure is."

"Do you mind if I slip off my shoes?" Olive asked, and without waiting for an answer she did, and promptly floated to the ceiling. "Thanks. That's much more comfortable!"

"These are my friends, Dad. The ones I was telling you about. This is Emma, and that's Olive, on the ceiling."

He staggered back a step. "I'm still sleeping," he said vaguely. "I'm so tired ..."

A chair lifted off the floor and floated over to him, followed by an expertly wrapped medical bandage bobbing through the air. "Then please, have a seat," Millard said.

"Okay," my dad replied, and he did.

"What are you doing here?" I whispered to Millard. "Shouldn't you be lying down?"

"I was in the neighborhood." He held up a modern-looking pill bottle. "I must say, they make some marvelously effective pain tablets in the future!"

"Dad, this is Millard," I said. "You can't see him because he's invisible."

"Nice to meet you."

"Likewise," said Millard.

I went over to my father and knelt down beside his chair. His head bobbed slightly. "I'm going away, Dad. You might not see me for a while."

"Oh, yeah? Where are you going?"

"On a trip."

"A trip," he repeated. "When will you be back?"

"I don't really know."

He shook his head. "Just like your grandfather." Millard ran tap water into a glass and brought it to him, and Dad reached out and took it, as though floating glasses weren't at all unusual. I guess he really thought he was dreaming. "Well, goodnight," he said and then stood up, steadied himself on the chair, and stumbled back into his bedroom. Stopping at the door, he turned to face me.

"Jake?"

"Yeah, Dad?"

"Be careful, okay?"

I nodded. He closed the door. A moment later I heard him fall into bed.

I sat down and rubbed my face. I didn't know how to feel.

"Did we help?" Olive asked from her perch on the ceiling.

"I'm not sure," I said. "I don't think so. He'll just wake up later thinking he dreamed all of you."

"You could write a letter," Millard suggested. "Tell him anything you like—it's not as if he'll be able to follow us."

"I did write a letter. But it's not proof."

"Ah," he replied. "Yes, I see your problem."

"Nice problem to have," said Olive. "Wish my mum and dad had loved me enough to worry when I left home."

Emma reached up and squeezed her hand. Then she said, "I might have proof."

She pulled a small wallet from the waistband of her dress and took out a snapshot. She handed it to me. It was a picture of her and my grandfather when my grandfather was young. All her attention was focused on him, but he seemed elsewhere. It was sad and beautiful and encapsulated what little I knew about their relationship.

"It was taken just before Abe left for the war," Emma said. "Your dad'll recognize me, won't he?"

I smiled at her. "You look like you haven't aged a day."

"Marvelous!" said Millard. "There's your proof."

"Do you always keep this with you?" I asked, handing it back to her.

"Yes. But I don't need it anymore." She went to the table and took my pen and began to write on the back of the photo. "What's your father's name?"

"Franklin."

When she finished writing, she gave it to me. I looked at both sides and then fished my letter from the trash, smoothed it, and left it on the table with the photo.

"Ready to go?" I said.

My friends were standing in the doorway, waiting for me.

"Only if you are," Emma replied.

We set out for the ridge. At the spot near the crest where I always stopped to see how far I'd come, this time I kept walking. Sometimes it's better not to look back.

When we reached the cairn, Olive patted the stones like a beloved old pet. "Goodbye, old loop," she said. "You've been such a good loop, and we'll miss you ever so much." Emma squeezed her shoulder, and they both crouched down and went inside.

In the rear chamber, Emma held her flame to the wall and showed me something I'd never noticed before: a long list of dates and initials carved into the rocks. "It's all the other times people have used this loop," she explained. "All the other days the loop's been looped."

Peering at it, I made out a P.M. 3-2-1853 and a J.R.R. 1-4-1797 and a barely-legible X.J. 1580. Near the bottom were some strange markings I couldn't decipher.

"Runic inscriptions," Emma said. "Quite ancient."

Millard searched through the gravel until he found a sharpened stone, and, using another stone as a hammer, he chipped an inscription of his own below the others. It read A.P. 3-9-1940.

"Who's AP?" asked Olive.

"Alma Peregrine," said Millard, and then he sighed. "It should be her carving this, not me."

Olive ran her hand over the rough markings. "Do you think another ymbryne will come along to make a loop here someday?"

"I hope so," he said. "I dearly hope so."

* * *

We buried Victor. Bronwyn lifted his whole bed and carried it outside with Victor still in it, and with all the children assembled on the grass she pulled back the sheets and tucked him in, planting one last kiss on his forehead. We boys lifted the corners of his bed like pallbearers and walked him down into the crater that the bomb had made. Then all of us climbed out but Enoch, who took a clay man from his pocket and laid it gently on the boy's chest.

"This is my very best man," he said. "To keep you company." The clay man sat up and Enoch pushed it back down with his thumb. The man rolled over with one arm under his head and seemed to go to sleep.

When the crater had been filled, Fiona dragged some shrubs and vines over the raw soil and began to grow them. By the time the rest of us had finished packing for the journey, Adam was back in his old spot, only now he was marking Victor's grave.

Once the children had said goodbye to their house, some taking chips of brick or flowers from the garden as forget-me-nots, we made one last trip across the island: through the smoking charred woods and the flat bog dug with bomb holes, over the ridge and down through the little town hung with peat smoke, where the townspeople lingered on porches and in doorways, so tired and numb with shock that they hardly seemed to notice the small parade of peculiar-looking children passing them by.

We were quiet but excited. The children hadn't slept, but you wouldn't have known it to look at them. It was September fourth, and for the first time in a very long time, the days were moving again. Some of them claimed they could feel the difference; the air in their lungs was fuller, the race of blood through their veins faster. They felt more vital, more real.

I did, too.

* * *

I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss. Yet as we stood loading our boats in the breaking dawn, on a brand new precipice of Before and After, I thought of everything I was about to leave behind—my parents, my town, my once-best-and-only friend—and I realized that leaving wouldn't be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight. Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.

And yet my old life was as impossible to return to as the children's bombed house. The doors had been blown off our cages.

Ten peculiar children and one peculiar bird were made to fit in just three stout rowboats, with much being jettisoned and left behind on the dock. When we'd finished, Emma suggested that one of us say something—make a speech to dedicate the journey ahead—but no one seemed ready with words. And so Enoch held up Miss Peregrine's cage and she let out a great screeching cry. We answered with a cry of our own, both a victory yell and a lament, for everything lost and yet to be gained.

Hugh and I rowed the first boat. Enoch sat watching us from the bow, ready to take his turn, while Emma in a sunhat studied the receding island. The sea was a pane of rippled glass spreading endlessly before us. The day was warm, but a cool breeze came off the water, and I could've happily rowed for hours. I wondered how such calm could belong to a world at war.

In the next boat, I saw Bronwyn wave and raise Miss Peregrine's camera to her eye. I smiled back. We'd brought none of the old photo albums with us; maybe this would be the first picture in a brand new one. It was strange to think that one day I might have my own stack of yellowed photos to show skeptical grandchildren—and my own fantastic stories to share.

Then Bronwyn lowered the camera and raised her arm, pointing at something beyond us. In the distance, black against the rising sun, a silent procession of battleships punctuated the horizon.

We rowed faster.