“It becomes a wight,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “But only if it consumes peculiars. It can eat as many normals as it likes and it will never turn into a wight. Therefore, we must have something normals lack.”
“But that hollow at the menagerie didn’t become a wight,” said Emma. “It became a hollow that could enter loops.”
“Which makes me wonder if the wights have been tinkering with nature,” said Millard, “vis-à-vis the transference of peculiar souls.”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” said Emma. “Can we please, please talk about something else?”
“But where would they even get the souls?” I asked. “And how?”
“That’s it, I’m sitting somewhere else,” Emma said, and she got up to find another seat.
Millard and I rode in silence for a while. I couldn’t stop imagining being strapped to a table while a cabal of evil doctors removed my soul. How would they do it? With a needle? A knife?
To derail this morbid train of thought, I tried changing the subject again. “How did we all get to be peculiar in the first place?” I asked.
“No one’s certain,” Millard answered. “There are legends, though.”
“Like what?”
“Some people believe we’re descended from a handful of peculiars who lived a long, long time ago,” he said. “They were very powerful—and enormous, like the stone giant we found.”
I said, “Why are we so small, then, if we used to be giants?”
“The story goes that over the years, as we multiplied, our power diluted. As we became less powerful, we got smaller, too.”
“That’s all pretty hard to swallow,” I said. “I feel about as powerful as an ant.”
“Ants are quite powerful, actually, relative to their size.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “The thing I really don’t get is, why me? I never asked to be this way. Who decided?”
It was a rhetorical question; I wasn’t really expecting an answer, but Millard gave me one anyway. “To quote a famous peculiar: ‘At the heart of nature’s mystery lies another mystery.’ ”
“Who said that?”
“We know him as Perplexus Anomalous. An invented name, probably, for a great thinker and philosopher. Perplexus was a cartographer, too. He drew the very first edition of the Map of Days, a thousand-something years ago.”
I chuckled. “You talk like a teacher sometimes. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“All the time,” Millard said. “I would’ve liked to try my hand at teaching. If I hadn’t been born like this.”
“You would’ve been great at it.”
“Thank you,” he said. Then he went quiet, and in the silence I could feel him dreaming it: scenes from a life that might’ve been. After a while he said, “I don’t want you to think that I don’t like being invisible. I do. I love being peculiar, Jacob—it’s the very core of who I am. But there are days I wish I could turn it off.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. But of course I didn’t. My peculiarity had its challenges, but at least I could participate in society.
The door to our compartment slid open. Millard quickly flipped up the hood of his jacket to hide his face—or rather, his apparent lack of one.
A young woman stood in the door. She wore a uniform and held a box of goods for sale. “Cigarettes?” she asked. “Chocolate?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
She looked at me. “You’re an American.”
“Afraid so.”
She gave me a pitying smile. “Hope you’re having a nice trip.
You picked an awkward time to visit Britain.”
I laughed. “So I’ve been told.”
She went out. Millard shifted his body to watch her go. “Pretty,” he said distantly.
It occurred to me that it had probably been a lot of years since he’d seen a girl outside of those few who lived on Cairnholm. But what chance would someone like him have with a normal girl, anyway?
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d been looking at him any particular way. “Like what?”
“Like you feel bad for me.”
“I don’t,” I said.
But I did.
Then Millard stood up from his seat, took off his coat, and disappeared. I didn’t see him again for a while.
*