Emma’s face darkened. “Show us.”
We followed them back the way they’d come, curving around a bend in the beach and climbing a small embankment. I wondered how we could have possibly missed something as obvious as hot air balloons, until we crested a hill and I saw them—not the big, colorful teardrop-shaped things you see in wall calendars and motivational posters (“The sky’s the limit!”), but a pair of miniature zeppelins: black egg-shaped sacs of gas with skeletal cages hung below them, each containing a single pilot. The craft were small and flew low, banking back and forth in lazy zigzags, and the noise of the surf had covered the subtle whine of their propellers. Emma herded us into the tall saw grass and we dropped down out of sight.
“They’re submarine hunters,” Enoch said, answering the question before anyone had asked it. Millard might’ve been the authority when it came to maps and books, but Enoch was an expert in all things military. “The best way to spot enemy subs is from the sky,” he explained.
“Then why are they flying so close to the ground?” I asked.
“And why aren’t they farther out to sea?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Do you think they could be looking for … us?” Horace ventured.
“If you mean could they be wights,” said Hugh, “don’t be daft. The wights are with the Germans. They’re on that German sub.”
“The wights are allied with whomever it suits their interests to be allied with,” Millard said. “There’s no reason to think they haven’t infiltrated organizations on both sides of the war.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the strange contraptions in the sky. They looked unnatural, like mechanical insects bloated with tumorous eggs.
“I don’t like the way they’re flying,” Enoch said, calculating behind his sharp eyes. “They’re searching the coastline, not the sea.”
“Searching for what?” asked Bronwyn, but the answer was obvious and frightening and no one wanted to say it aloud.
They were searching for us.
We were all squeezed together in the grass, and I felt Emma’s body tense next to mine. “Run when I say run,” she hissed. “We’ll hide the boats, then ourselves.”
We waited for the balloons to zag away, then tumbled out of the grass, praying we were too far away to be spotted. As we ran I found myself wishing that the fog which had plagued us at sea would return again to hide us. It occurred to me that it had very likely saved us once already; without the fog those balloons would’ve spotted us hours ago, in our boats, when we’d had nowhere to run. And in that way, it was one last thing that the island had done to save its peculiar children.
*
We dragged our boats across the beach toward a sea cave, its entrance a black fissure in a hill of rocks. Bronwyn had spent her strength completely and could hardly manage to carry herself, much less the boats, so the rest of us struggled to pick up the slack, groaning and straining against hulls that kept trying to bury their noses in the wet sand. Halfway across the beach, Miss Peregrine let out a warning cry, and the two zeppelins bobbed up over the dunes and into our line of sight. We broke into an adrenaline-fueled sprint, flying those boats into the cave like they were on rails, while Miss Peregrine hopped lamely alongside us, her broken wing dragging in the sand.
When we were finally out of sight we dropped the boats and flopped onto their overturned keels, our wheezing breaths echoing in the damp and dripping dark. “Please, please let them not have seen us,” Emma prayed aloud.
“Ah, birds! Our tracks!” Millard yelped, and then he stripped off the overcoat he’d been wearing and scrambled back outside to cover the drag marks our boats had made; from the sky they’d look like arrows pointing right to our hiding place. We could only watch his footsteps trail away. If anyone but Millard had ventured out, they’d have been seen for sure.
A minute later he came back, shivering, caked in sand, a red stain outlining his chest. “They’re getting close now,” he panted. “I did the best I could.”
“You’re bleeding again!” Bronwyn fretted. Millard had been grazed by a bullet during our melee at the lighthouse the previous night, and though his recovery so far was remarkable, it was far from complete. “What have you done with your wound dressing?”
“I threw it away. It was tied in such a complicated manner that I couldn’t remove it quickly. An invisible must always be able to disrobe in an instant, or his power is useless!”
“He’s even more useless dead, you stubborn mule,” said Emma. “Now hold still and don’t bite your tongue. This is going to hurt.” She squeezed two fingers in the palm of her opposite hand, concentrated for a moment, and when she took them out again they glowed, red hot.