Hollow City

  Then my thoughts strayed to my parents, as they always did when I didn’t keep a tight rein on them. I tried to picture their faces as I’d last seen them. Bits and pieces coalesced in my mind: the thin rim of stubble my dad had developed after a few days on the island; the way my mom, without realizing it, would fiddle with her wedding ring when my dad talked too long about something that disinterested her; my dad’s darting eyes, always checking the horizon on his never-ending search for birds.

  Now they’d be searching for me.

  As evening settled in, the camp came alive around us. The Gypsies talked and laughed, and when a band of children with battered horns and fiddles struck up a song, they danced. Between songs one of the boys from the band snuck around back of our cage with a bottle in his hands. “It’s for the sick one,” he said, checking behind him nervously.

  “Who?” I said, and then he nodded at Hugh, who wilted to the floor in spasms of coughing, right on cue.

  The boy slipped the bottle through the bars. I twisted off the cap, gave it a sniff, and nearly fell over. It smelled like turpentine mixed with compost. “What is it?” I said.

  “Works, that’s all I know.” He looked behind him again. “All right, I done something for you. Now you owes. So tell me—what crime did you do? You’re thieves, aincha?” Then he lowered his voice and said, “Or didja kill someone?”

  “What’s he talking about?” said Bronwyn.

  We didn’t kill anyone, I came close to saying, but then an image of Golan’s body tumbling through the air toward a battery of rocks flashed in my mind, and I kept quiet.

  Emma said it for me instead. “We didn’t kill anyone!”

  “Well, you musta done something,” the boy said. “Why else would they have a reward out for you?”

  “There’s a reward?” said Enoch.

  “Sure as rain. They’re offering a whole pile of money.”

  “Who is?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Are you going to turn us in?” Olive asked.

  The boy twisted his lip. “Dunno if we will or we won’t. The big shots are chewing it over. Though I’ll say they don’t much trust the sort of people who’s offerin’ the reward. Then again, money’s money, and they don’t much like it that you won’t answer their questions.”

  “Where we come from,” Emma said haughtily, “you don’t question people who come to you asking for help.”

  “And you don’t put ’em in cages, either!” said Olive.

  Just then a tremendous bang went off in the middle of the camp. The Gypsy boy lost his balance and fell off the ramp into the grass, and the rest of us ducked as pots and pans went flying through the air away from a cookfire. The Gypsy woman who’d been tending it sped off screaming bloody murder, her dress on fire, and she might’ve run all the way to the ocean if someone hadn’t picked up a horse’s drinking bucket and doused her with it.

  A moment later we heard the footsteps of an invisible boy pounding up the ramp outside our cage. “That’s what happens when you try and make an omelet from a peculiar chicken egg!” said Millard, out of breath and laughing.

  “You did that?” said Horace.

  “Everything was too orderly and quiet … bad weather for pickpocketing! So I slipped one of our eggs in with theirs, et voilà!” Millard made a key appear out of thin air. “People are much less likely to notice my hand in their pockets when dinner’s just exploded in their faces.”

  “Took you long enough,” said Enoch. “Now let us out of here!”

  But before Millard could get the key in the door, the Gypsy boy stood up and shouted, “Help! They’re trying to get away!”

  The boy had heard everything—but in the confusion following the blast, hardly anyone noticed his shouts.

  Millard twisted the key in the lock. The door wouldn’t open.

  “Oh, drat,” he said. “Perhaps I stole the wrong key?”

  “Ahhhh!” the boy screamed, pointing at the space Millard’s voice emanated from. “A ghost!”

  “Will someone please shut him up!” said Enoch.

  Bronwyn obliged, reaching through the cage to grab the boy’s arms, then pulling him off his feet and up against the bars.

  “Haaaaalp!” he screamed. “They’ve got mmmfff—”

  She slapped a hand over his mouth, but she’d silenced him too late. “Galbi!” a woman shouted. “Let him go, you savages!”

  And suddenly, without really meaning to, we’d taken a hostage. Gypsy men rushed at us, knives flashing in the failing light.

  “What are you doing?” cried Millard. “Let that boy go before they murder us!”

  “No, don’t!” Emma said, and then she screamed, “Free us or the boy dies!”

  The Gypsies surrounded us, shouting threats. “If you harm him in any way,” the leader yelled, “I’ll kill every last one of you with my bare hands!”

  “Stay back!” Emma said. “Just let us go and we won’t hurt anyone.”

  One of the men made a run at the cage, and instinctively, Emma flicked out her hands and sparked a roaring fireball between them. The crowd gasped and the man skidded to a stop.

  “Now you’ve done it!” hissed Enoch. “They’ll hang us for being witches!”

  “I’ll burn the first one that tries!” Emma shouted, widening the space between her palms to make the fireball even larger. “Come on, let’s show them who they’re messing with!”

  It was time to put on a show. Bronwyn went first: with one hand she raised the boy even higher, his feet kicking in the air, and with the other she grabbed one of the roof bars and began to bend it. Horace stuck his face between the bars and shot a line of bees from his open mouth, and then Millard, who’d sprinted away from the cage the moment the boy had noticed him, shouted from somewhere behind the crowd, “And if you think you can contend with them, you haven’t met me!” and launched an egg into the air. It arced above their heads and landed in a nearby clearing with a huge bang, scattering dirt as high as the treetops.

  As the smoke cleared, there was a breathless moment in which no one moved or spoke. I thought at first that our display had paralyzed the Gypsies with awe—but then, when the ringing in my ears had faded, I realized they were listening for something. Then I was, too.

  From the darkening road came the sound of an engine. A pair of headlights flickered into view beyond the trees, along the road. Everyone, Gypsy and peculiar, watched as the lights passed the turnoff to our clearing—then slowed, then came back. A canvas-topped military vehicle rumbled toward us. From inside it, the sounds of angry voices shouting and dogs, their throats hoarse from barking but unable to stop now that they’d caught our scent again.

  It was the wights who’d been hunting us—and here we were inside a cage, unable even to run.

  Emma extinguished her flame with a clap of her hands. Bronwyn dropped the boy and he stumbled away. The Gypsies fled back to their wagons or into the woods. In moments we were left alone, seemingly forgotten.

  Their leader strode toward us.

  “Open the cage!” Emma begged him.

  She was ignored. “Hide yourselves under the hay and don’t make a sound!” the man said. “And no magic tricks—unless you’d rather go with them.”

  There was no time for more questions. The last thing we saw before everything went black were two Gypsy men running at us with a tarp in their hands. They flipped it over the top of our cage.

  Instant night.

  * * *

  Boots tromped by outside the cage, heavy and thudding, as if the wights sought to punish the very ground they walked upon. We did as instructed and dug ourselves into the stinking hay.

  Nearby, I heard a wight talking to the Gypsy leader. “A group of children were seen along the road this morning,” the wight said, his voice clipped, accent obscure—not quite English, not quite German. “There’s a reward for their capture.”

  “We haven’t run across anyone all day, sir,” the leader said.

  “Don
’t let their innocent faces fool you. They’re traitors to the war effort. Spies for Germany. The penalty for hiding them …”

  “We aren’t hiding anything,” the leader said gruffly. “See for yourself.”

  “I’ll do that,” said the wight. “And if we find them here, I’ll cut your tongue out and feed it to my dog.” The wight stomped away.

  “Don’t. Even. Breathe,” the leader hissed at us, and then his footsteps trailed away, too.

  I wondered why he would lie for us, given the harm these wights could cause his people. Maybe it was out of pride, or some deep-rooted disdain for authority—or, I thought with a cringe, maybe the Gypsies just wanted the satisfaction of killing us themselves.

  All around us we could hear the wights spreading throughout the camp, kicking things over, throwing open caravan doors, shoving people. A child screamed and a man reacted angrily, but was cut short with the sound of wood meeting flesh. It was excruciating to lie there and listen to people suffer—even if those same people had been ready to tear us limb from limb just minutes ago.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Hugh rise from the hay and crawl to Bronwyn’s trunk. He slipped his fingers over the latch and began to open the lid, but Bronwyn stopped him. “What are you doing?” she mouthed.

  “We’ve got to get them before they get us!”

  Emma lifted herself out of the hay on her elbows and rolled toward them, and I got closer too, to listen.

  “Don’t be insane,” said Emma. “If we throw the eggs now, they’ll shoot us to ribbons.”

  “So what, then?” said Hugh. “We should just lie here until they find us?”

  We clustered around the trunk, speaking in whispers.

  “Wait until they unlock the door,” said Enoch. “Then I’ll throw an egg through the bars behind us. That’ll distract the wights long enough for Bronwyn to crack the skull of whichever one comes into the cage first, which should give the rest of us time to run. Scatter to the outer edges of camp, then turn and throw your eggs back at the middle-most campfire. Everyone in a thirty-meter radius will be a memory.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Hugh. “That just might work.”

  “But there are children in the camp!” said Bronwyn.

  Enoch rolled his eyes. “Or we can worry about collateral damage, run into the woods, and leave the wights and their dogs to hunt us down one by one. But if we plan on reaching London—or living beyond tonight—I don’t recommend it.”

  Hugh patted Bronwyn’s hand, which was covering the trunk latch. “Open it,” he said. “Give them out.”

  Bronwyn hesitated. “I can’t. I can’t kill children who’ve done nothing to harm us.”

  “But we don’t have a choice!” whispered Hugh.

  “You always have a choice,” said Bronwyn.

  Then we heard a dog snarl very near the bottom rim of the cage, and went silent. A moment later a flashlight shone against the outside of the tarp. “Tear this sheet down!” someone said—the dog’s handler, I assumed.

  The dog barked, its nose snuffling to get beneath the tarp and up through the cage bars. “Over here!” shouted the handler. “We’ve got something!”

  We all looked to Bronwyn. “Please,” Hugh said. “At least let us defend ourselves.”

  “It’s the only way,” said Enoch.

  Bronwyn sighed and took her hand away from the latch. Hugh nodded gratefully and opened the trunk lid. We all reached in and took an egg from between the layered sweaters—everyone but Bronwyn. Then we stood and faced the cage door, eggs in hand, and prepared for the inevitable.

  More boots marched toward us. I tried to prepare myself for what was coming. Run, I told myself. Run and don’t look back and then throw it.

  But knowing that innocent people would die, could I really do it? Even to save my own life? What if I just dropped the egg in some grass and ran into the woods?

  A hand grabbed one edge of the tarp and pulled. The tarp began to slide away.

  Then, just shy of exposing us, it stopped.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I heard the dog’s handler say.

  “I’d steer well away from that cage if I was you,” said another voice—a Gypsy’s.

  I could see half the sky above us, stars twinkling down through the branches of oaks.

  “Yeah? And why is that?” said the handler.

  “Old Bloodcoat ain’t been fed in a few days,” the Gypsy said.

  “He don’t usually care for the taste of humans, but when he’s this hungry he ain’t so discriminating!”

  Then came a sound that stole the breath right out of me—the roar of a giant bear. Impossibly, it seemed to be coming from among us, inside our cage. I heard the dog’s handler shout in surprise and then scramble down the ramp, pulling his yelping dog along with him.

  I couldn’t fathom how a bear had gotten into the cage, only that I needed to get away from it, so I pressed myself hard against the bars. Next to me I saw Olive stick her little fist in her mouth to keep from crying out.

  Outside, other soldiers were laughing at the handler. “Idiot!” he said, embarrassed. “Only Gypsies would keep an animal like that in the middle of their camp!”

  I finally worked up the courage to turn around and look behind me. There was no bear in our cage. What had made that awful roar?

  The soldiers kept searching the camp, but now they left our cage alone. After a few minutes we heard them pile back into their truck and restart the engine, and then, at last, they were gone.

  The tarp slid away from our cage. The Gypsies were all gathered around us. I held my egg in one trembling hand, wondering if I’d have to use it.

  The leader stood before us. “Are you all right?” he said. “I’m sorry if that frightened you.”

  “We’re alive,” Emma replied, looking around warily. “But where’s this bear of yours?”

  “You aren’t the only ones with unusual talents,” said a young man at the edge of the crowd, and then in quick succession he growled like a bear and yowled like a cat, throwing his voice from one place to another with slight turns of his head so that it sounded like we were being stalked from all directions. When we’d gotten over our shock, we broke into applause.

  “I thought you said they weren’t peculiar,” I whispered to Emma.

  “Anyone can do parlor tricks like that,” she said.

  “Apologies if I failed to properly introduce myself,” said the Gypsy leader. “My name is Bekhir Bekhmanatov. And you are our honored guests.” He bowed deeply. “Why didn’t you tell us you were syndrigasti?”

  We gaped at him. He had used the ancient name for peculiars, the one Miss Peregrine had taught us.

  “Do we know you from somewhere?” Bronwyn asked.

  “Where did you hear that word?” said Emma.

  Bekhir smiled. “If you’ll accept our hospitality, I promise to explain everything.” Then he bowed again and strode forward to unlock our cage.

  * * *

  We sat with the Gypsies on fine, handwoven carpets, talking and eating stew by the shimmering light of twin campfires. I dropped the spoon I’d been given and slurped straight from a wooden bowl, my table manners a distant memory as greasy, delicious broth dribbled down my chin. Bekhir walked among us, making sure each peculiar child was comfortable, asking if we had enough to eat and drink, and apologizing repeatedly for the state of our clothes, now covered in filthy bits of hay from the cage. Since witnessing our peculiar display he’d changed his attitude toward us completely; in the span of a few minutes we’d graduated from being prisoners to guests of honor.

  “I’m very sorry for the way you were treated,” he said, lowering himself onto a cushion between the fires. “When it comes to the safety of my people, I must take every precaution. There are many strangers wandering the roads these days—people who aren’t what they appear to be. If you’d only told me you were syndrigasti …”

  “We were taught never, ever to tell anyone,” said Emma.
r />   “Ever,” Olive added.

  “Whoever taught you that is very wise,” Bekhir said.

  “How do you know about us?” Emma asked. “You speak the old tongue.”

  “Only a few words,” Bekhir said. He gazed into the flames, a spit of darkening meat roasting there. “We have an old understanding, your people and mine. We aren’t so different. Outcasts and wanderers all—souls clinging to the margins of the world.” He pinched a hunk of meat from the spit and chewed it thoughtfully. “We are allies of a sort. Over the years, we Gypsies have even taken in and raised some of your children.”

  “And we’re grateful for it,” said Emma, “and for your hospitality as well. But at the risk of seeming rude, we can’t possibly stay with you any longer. It’s very important that we reach London quickly. We have a train to catch.”

  “For your sick friend?” Bekhir asked, raising an eyebrow at Hugh, who had long ago dropped his act and was now gulping down stew with abandon, bees buzzing happily around his head.

  “Something like that,” said Emma.

  Bekhir knew we were hiding something, but he was kind enough to let us have our secrets. “There won’t be any more trains tonight,” he said, “but we’ll rise at dawn and deliver you to the station before the first one leaves in the morning. Good enough?”

  “It’ll have to be,” Emma said, her brow pinched with worry. Even though we’d saved time by hitching a ride instead of walking, Miss Peregrine had still lost an entire day. Now she had only two left, at most. But that was in the future; right now we were warm, well fed, and out of immediate danger. It was hard not to enjoy ourselves, if only for the moment.

  We made fast friends with the Gypsies. Everyone was eager to forget what had happened between us earlier. Bronwyn tried to apologize to the boy she’d taken hostage, but he brushed it off like it had been nothing. The Gypsies fed us relentlessly, refilling my bowl again and again—overfilling it when I tried to refuse more. When Miss Peregrine hopped out of Bronwyn’s coat and announced her appetite with a screech, the Gypsies fed her, too, tossing hunks of raw meat in the air and cheering when she leapt up to snatch them. “She’s hungry!” Olive laughed, clapping as the bird shredded a pig knuckle with her talons.