“There’s one thing we haven’t tried,” Olive said, piping up from the edge of our group.
“And what’s that?” asked Emma.
Olive decided to show rather than tell us. Leaving the sidewalk, she went into the crowd, turned to face the building, and called at the top of her lungs, “Hello, Miss Wren! If you’re in there, please come out! We need your—”
Before she could finish, Bronwyn had tackled her, and the rest of Olive’s sentence was delivered into the big girl’s armpit. “Are you insane?” Bronwyn said, bringing Olive back to us under her arm.
“You’re going to get us all found out!”
She set Olive on the sidewalk and was about to chastise her further when tears began streaming down the little girl’s face. “What does it matter if we’re found out?” Olive said. “If we can’t find Miss Wren and we can’t save Miss Peregrine, what does it matter if the whole wight army descends on us right now?”
A lady stepped out of the crowd and approached us. She was older, back bent with age, her face partly obscured by the hood of a cloak. “Is she all right?” the lady asked.
“She’s fine, thank you,” Emma said dismissively.
“I’m not!” said Olive. “Nothing is right! All we ever wanted was to live in peace on our island, and then bad things came and hurt our headmistress. Now all we want to do is help her—and we can’t even do that!”
Olive hung her head and began to weep pitifully.
“Well then,” said the woman, “it’s an awfully good thing you came to see me.”
Olive looked up, sniffled, and said, “Why is that?”
And then the woman vanished.
Just like that.
She disappeared right out of her clothes, and her cloak, suddenly empty, collapsed onto the pavement with an airy whump. We were all too stunned to speak—until a small bird came hopping out from beneath the folds of the cloak.
I froze, not sure if I should try to catch it.
“Does anyone know what sort of bird that is?” asked Horace.
“I believe that’s a wren,” said Millard.
The bird flapped its wings, leapt into the air, and flew away, disappearing around the side of the building.
“Don’t lose her!” Emma shouted, and we all took off running after it, slipping and sliding on the ice, rounding the corner into the snow-choked alley that ran between the glaciated building and the one next to it.
The bird was gone.
“Drat!” Emma said. “Where’d she go?”
Then a series of odd sounds came up from the ground beneath our feet: metallic clanks, voices, and a noise like water flushing. We kicked the snow away to find a pair of wooden doors set into the bricks, like the entrance to a coal cellar.
The doors were unlatched. We pulled them open. Inside were steps that led down into the dark, covered in quick-melting ice, the meltwater draining loudly into an unseen gutter.
Emma crouched and called into the darkness. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
“If you’re coming,” returned a distant voice, “come quickly!”
Emma stood up, surprised. Then shouted: “Who are you?”
We waited for an answer. None came.
“What are we waiting for?” said Olive. “It’s Miss Wren!”
“We don’t know that,” said Millard. “We don’t know what happened here.”
“Well, I’m going to find out,” Olive said, and before anyone could stop her she’d gone to the cellar doors and leapt through them, floating gently to the bottom. “I’m still alive!” her voice taunted us from the dark.
And so we were shamed into following her, and climbed down the steps to find a passage tunneled through thick ice. Freezing water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the walls in a steady stream. And it wasn’t completely dark, after all—gauzy light glowed from around a turn in the passage ahead.
We heard footsteps approaching. A shadow climbed the wall in front of us. Then a cloaked figure appeared at the turn in the passage, silhouetted in the light.
“Hello, children,” the figure said. “I am Balenciaga Wren, and I’m so pleased you’re here.”
I am Balenciaga Wren.