A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,119
other choice, I’d take the risk.
“You asked me to trust you,” said Noor. “First, trust me.”
The footsteps were growing louder and louder. I slipped my empty hand out of the bag. Noor pushed us into the corner, then stood in the center of the room and began to rake her hands through the air. With each pass of her hands the room around us grew darker by degrees, the little natural light that shone in from the hallway dimming and then disappearing altogether—into her hands. And then she took all that glowing concentrated light, stuffed it into her mouth, and swallowed it.
I can only tell you what I saw, and it was one of the most peculiar things I’d ever witnessed. I watched that ball of light glow through her cheeks and travel down her throat and into her stomach, where her body seemed to absorb and dampen it, until finally, just as the footsteps were reaching the doorway, it disappeared completely. We were left standing in a blackness so total that when two men filled the doorway and aimed their blinding flashlights into the room, the dark seemed to reach out and wrap itself around them. Their lights were reduced to pinpricks, and they stumbled into the room half blind, one whacking the light against his hand while the other spoke into a crackling walkie-talkie.
“Subjects are on level six. Repeat, level six.”
We pressed our backs to the wall, silent, hardly daring to breathe. We were so hidden by the enveloping dark that I really thought they might not find us. And they might not have, except for one thing.
My phone. It was set to vibrate, but even muffled inside my bag, it made noise—a tiny humming sound that gave us away instantly.
Everything that happened after that unfolded with incredible speed. The men both dropped to one knee. The words firing position flitted through my head just as Noor made a sudden guttural growl, and the light she’d been holding in her stomach shot up into her throat and burst forth from her mouth toward the two men in a blast that looked—even with my face turned and my eyes shut—like a thousand flashbulbs going off at once. I felt a wave of heat. I heard the men scream and fall. When I opened my eyes again, every inch of the room was alive with bright white light, and the men were on the ground clutching their faces.
We were about to run past them, out of the room, when more footsteps came. Another man rounded in from the hallway. He had a gun and looked about to use it, but Bronwyn lunged at him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and, as his gun went off, flung him toward the back wall. He crashed right through it, pulverized concrete dust mixing in the air with a pink puff of blood. There was just enough time for Noor to turn from the hole to Bronwyn, her mouth forming a perfect O, before we all came to our senses and climbed through it.
On the other side of the hole in the wall, beyond the man’s crumpled body, was a room flooded with daylight, and beyond that a stairway. We barreled down it, Bronwyn carrying Lilly over her shoulder, rounding corners at a dizzying pace until we’d descended six stories to the ground floor. We ran outside then through a hole in the fence into some back alley, then through the parking lot of a warehouse and into another alley, not even looking behind us, just listening for the helicopter, which faded a little more and then a little more still, until we were forced to stop and catch our breath.
“I think—I think you might have killed that guy,” Noor said to Bronwyn, her eyes wide.
“He had a gun,” Bronwyn said, and set Lilly down on her feet. “If you point a gun at my friends, I get to kill you. That’s—” She wiped her glistening forehead and let out a sighing breath. “That’s the rule.”
“Good rule,” said Noor. She turned to me. “Sorry for what I said. About you maybe being one of them.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “If I were you, I might not have believed us either.”
Noor went to Lilly and took her hand. “You all right, Lil?”
“Little shaken up,” said Lilly. “I’ll live.”
“We have to get far away from here, and quickly,” Emma said. “What’s the fastest way?”