Hollow City (2 page)

E
NOCH
O
’
C
ONNOR
A boy who can animate the dead for brief periods of time

H
UGH
A
PISTON
A boy who commands and protects the many bees that live in his stomach

F
IONA
F
RAUENFELD
A silent girl with a peculiar talent for making plants grow

C
LAIRE
D
ENSMORE
A girl with an extra mouth in the back of her head; the youngest of Miss Peregrine’s peculiar children

A
LMA
L
EFAY
P
EREGRINE
Ymbryne, shape-shifter, manipulator of time; headmistress of Cairnholm’s loop; arrested in bird form

E
SMERELDA
A
VOCET
An ymbryne whose loop was raided by the corrupted; kidnapped by wights

NONPECULIAR PERSONAE

F
RANKLIN
P
ORTMAN
Jacob’s father; bird hobbyist, wannabe writer

M
ARYANN
P
ORTMAN
Jacob’s mother; heiress to Florida’s second-largest drugstore chain

R
ICKY
P
ICKERING
Jacob’s only normal friend

D
OCTOR
G
OLAN

(
DECEASED
)
A wight who posed as a psychiatrist to deceive Jacob and his family; later killed by Jacob

R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
MERSON

(
DECEASED
)
Essayist, lecturer, poet

W
e rowed out through the harbor, past bobbing boats weeping rust from their seams, past juries of silent seabirds roosting atop the barnacled remains of sunken docks, past fishermen who lowered their nets to stare frozenly as we slipped by, uncertain whether we were real or imagined; a procession of waterborne ghosts, or ghosts soon to be. We were ten children and one bird in three small and unsteady boats, rowing with quiet intensity straight out to sea, the only safe harbor for miles receding quickly behind us, craggy and magical in the blue-gold light of dawn. Our goal, the rutted coast of mainland Wales, was somewhere before us but only dimly visible, an inky smudge squatting along the far horizon.

We rowed past the old lighthouse, tranquil in the distance, which only last night had been the scene of so many traumas. It was there that, with bombs exploding around us, we had nearly drowned, nearly been torn apart by bullets; that I had taken a gun and pulled its trigger and killed a man, an act still incomprehensible to me; that we had lost Miss Peregrine and got her back again—snatched from the steel jaws of a submarine—though the Miss Peregrine who was returned to us was damaged, in need of help we didn’t know how to give. She perched now on the stern of our boat, watching the sanctuary she’d created slip away, more lost with every oar stroke.

Finally we rowed past the breakwater and into the great blank open, and the glassy surface of the harbor gave way to little waves that chopped at the sides of our boats. I heard a plane threading the clouds high above us and let my oars drag, neck craning up, arrested by a vision of our little armada from such a height: this world I had chosen, and everything I had in it, and all our precious, peculiar lives, contained in three splinters of wood adrift upon the vast, unblinking eye of the sea.

Mercy.