“I can float us!” Olive said. “I’m strong enough!”
“No way!” Enoch said. “You’re tiny, and there are too many of us!”
The tower rocked sickeningly. Ceiling tiles crashed down around us and cracks spidered through the floor.
“Fine, then!” Olive said. “Stay behind!”
She started upstairs. It took the rest of us only a moment, and one more wobble of the tower, to decide that Olive was our only hope.
Our lives were now in the dainty hands of our smallest member. Bird help us.
We ran up the sloping hallway, then out into open air and what remained of the day. Below us spread a commanding view of Devil’s Acre: the compound and its pale walls, the misty chasm and its hollow-gapped bridge, the black tinders of Smoking Street and the packed tenements beyond—and then the Ditch, snaking along the loop’s edge like a ring of scum. Whatever happened next, whether we lived or died, I’d be happy at least to see the last of this place.
We bellied up to the circular railing. Emma gripped my hand. “Don’t look down, eh?”
One by one the ymbrynes turned to birds and perched on the rail, ready to help however they could. Olive took hold of the railing with both hands and slipped out of her shoes. Her feet bobbed upward until she was doing a weightless headstand on the rail, her heels aimed at the sky.
“Bronwyn, take my feet!” she said. “We’ll make a chain. Emma grabs Bronwyn’s legs, and Jacob Emma’s legs, and Horace Emma’s, and Horace Hugh’s …”
“My left leg’s hurt!” Hugh said.
“Then Horace will grab your right one!” Olive said.
“This is madness!” said Sharon. “We’ll be much too heavy!”
Olive started to argue, but a sudden tremor shook the tower so hard that we had to cling to the rail or be shaken off.
It was Olive’s way or nothing.
“You get the idea!” Miss Peregrine shouted. “Do as Olive says and, most importantly, don’t let go until we reach the ground!”
Little Olive bent her knees, kicked one foot down toward Bronwyn, and offered it to her. Bronwyn took Olive’s foot, then reached up and grabbed the other one. Olive let go of the rail and stood up in Bronwyn’s hands, pushing toward the sky like a swimmer kicking off the wall of a pool.
Bronwyn was lifted off her feet. Emma quickly grabbed hold of Bronwyn’s legs, and then she was lifted, too, as Olive strained upward, gritting her teeth, willing herself higher. Then it was my turn—but Olive, it seemed, was running out of lift power. She struggled and groaned, dog-paddling toward the sky, but she was out of juice. That’s when Miss Peregrine turned into a bird, flapped into the air, hooked her talons through the back of Olive’s dress, and lifted.
My feet came off the ground. Hugh grabbed onto my legs and Horace onto his legs and Enoch onto his and so on, until even Perplexus and Addison and Sharon and his cousins had caught a ride. We strung out into the air like a strange, wiggling kite, Millard its invisible tail. The other, smaller ymbrynes hooked into our clothes here and there and flapped furiously, adding what lift they could.
The last of us had only just left the tower when the whole thing began to crumble. I looked down in time to see it fall. It happened quickly, tumbling in on itself, the top section seeming to implode as if it had been sucked into the collapsing loop. After that the rest just went, tipping over in one section before breaking in the middle and slumping into a huge cloud of dust and debris, the sound like a million bricks being poured into a quarry. By then Miss Peregrine’s strength was flagging and we were falling slowly toward the ground, the ymbrynes pulling us hard to one side for a soft landing away from the wreckage.
We touched down in the courtyard, Millard first and then finally Olive, who was so spent that she landed on her back and stayed there, breathing like she’d just run a marathon. We gathered around, cheering and applauding her.
Her eyes got big and she pointed up. “Look!”
In the air behind us, where the top of the tower had been just moments before, there spun a small vortex of shimmering silver, like a miniature hurricane. It was the last of the collapsing loop. We watched hypnotized as it shrank, spinning faster and faster. When it became too small to see, there issued from it a sound like the crack of a sonic boom:
“ALMAAAAAAAAAA …”
And then the whirlwind winked out, sucking Caul’s voice away with it.
CHAPTER X
After the loop collapsed and the tower fell, we weren’t allowed to stand shell-shocked and gaping—at least not for long. Though it seemed the worst dangers were behind us and most of our enemies had been felled or captured, there was chaos all around and work to be done. Despite our exhaustion and bruises and sprains, the ymbrynes set about doing what ymbrynes do best, which was to create order. They changed into human form and took charge. The compound was searched for hidden wights. Two surrendered outright, and Addison discovered another—a miserable-looking woman hiding in a hole in the ground.
She came out with her arms raised, begging for mercy. Sharon’s cousins were employed constructing a makeshift jail to hold our small but growing number of prisoners, and they set happily to work, singing while they hammered. Sharon was interrogated by Miss Peregrine and Miss Avocet, but after just a few minutes of questioning, they were satisfied that he was merely a mercenary, not a secret operative or a traitor. Sharon had seemed as shocked by Bentham’s betrayal as the rest of us.
In short order the wights’ prisons and laboratories were emptied and their machines of terror smashed. The subjects of their horrible experiments were brought out into the open and attended to. Dozens more were freed from another block of cells. They emerged from the underground building where they’d been held looking thin and ragged. Some wandered in a daze and had to be corralled and watched, lest they walk away and get lost. Others were so overwhelmed by gratitude that they couldn’t stop thanking us. One small girl spent half an hour going from one peculiar to another, surprising us with hugs. “You don’t know what you did for us,” she kept saying. “You don’t know what you did.”
It was impossible not to be affected by it, and as we gave them what comfort we could, we were beset by sniffles and sighs. I could not begin to imagine what my friends had been through, much less those who’d spent weeks or months in Caul’s keeping. Compared to that, my bruises and traumas were inconsequential.
The rescued peculiars I’ll remember most were three brothers. They seemed in fair health but were so shocked by what they’d experienced that they would not speak. At the first opportunity they retreated from the crowd, found a bit of rubble to hunker on, and stared hollowly around them, the oldest with his arms stretched around the younger two. As if they could not quite square the scene before them with the hell they had accepted as reality.
Emma and I crossed to where they were sitting. “You’re safe now,” she said gently.
They looked at her as if they didn’t know the meaning of the word.
Enoch saw us talking to them and came over with Bronwyn. She was dragging a barely conscious wight behind her, a white-coated lab worker with his hands tied. The boys recoiled.
“He can’t hurt you anymore,” Bronwyn said. “None of them can.”
“Maybe we should leave him here with you awhile,” said Enoch with a devilish grin. “I’ll bet you’d have a lot to talk about.”
The wight lifted his head. When he saw the boys, his blackened eyes widened.
“Stop it,” I said. “Don’t torment them.”
The youngest boy’s hands curled into fists and he started to get up, but the oldest boy held him back and whispered something in his ear. The younger boy closed his eyes and nodded, as if putting something away, then tucked his fists tightly under his arms.
“No thank’y,” he said in a polite Southern drawl.
“Come on,” I said, and we let them be, Bronwyn dragging the wight along behind her.
*