A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,131

“London. See, Bill, it’s worse than I thought. Now we got limey peculiars coming after us, not just Los Californios.”

“She’s not one of you, and she’s not yours,” I said. “It was her choice to come with us.”

Leo straightened his collar and came right up to me. His goon’s grip on my arm tightened. “I don’t know if you’re really ignorant or just pretending to be,” he said quietly, “but it don’t matter. The law is the law, and it’s the same law all over this country. That light-eater’s a local, and inducing her to leave is a crime—one you’ve admitted to. I got no choice but to make an example out of you.” He raised his hand and slapped me, and it happened so fast I didn’t have time to prepare myself for the blow. The shock and force of it almost knocked me over.

“Bill, get these punks out of my office. Find out who they are, and don’t be afraid to put the screws on. We’re done looking soft.”

“You got it, Leo.”

I saw Emma’s face as we were being dragged out, and she saw mine. I mouthed, We’ll be okay. But for the first time since we’d left my house in Florida days ago, I really wasn’t sure.

That was the first time I met Leo, but it would not be the last.

* * *

• • •

I couldn’t tell you how long I spent in that cell. It felt like days, but it was probably less than twenty-four hours. There was no window, no sun, no furniture other than a cot and a toilet. The only light was a bare bulb that never stopped burning, and under those conditions the passage of time becomes harder to gauge, especially when you’re suffering from loop lag and your body hardly knows what time it is in the first place.

They brought me food in a tin bowl, water in a tin cup. Every few hours someone came to interrogate me. Usually a different person each time. At first all they wanted to know was where I was from and who I worked with. They really seemed to believe I was from California but lying about it. That I was a “Californio”—that was the word they kept using. Though I denied it in every possible way, the truth—that I was part of this band of peculiars from Great Britain—sounded so unlikely, given my obvious Americanness and the fact that I came from the modern day and my friends did not. It was very difficult to convince them. My story made no sense. They talked with cruel ease about killing me, and the various terrible penalties for the “crimes” my friends and I had committed. But they didn’t beat me. They didn’t torture me. I think it had something to do with the man down the hall. Every few hours they would take me out of the cell and walk me down to another windowless room, where I would sit across from an owlish man with tight-cropped hair and little round glasses. He would stare at me for long minutes without speaking, leaned way back in his chair, nibbling on pickles.

My theory is that he was trying to read my mind. I don’t know if the pickles were part of his technique or if he just had an addiction to them. Eventually he must have found out whatever it was he wanted to find out—or perhaps they got through to one of my friends’ brains—because my other interrogators suddenly changed their tune. Now they seemed to believe me when I insisted I wasn’t from California, and that I was part of this group of peculiars from across the ocean.

After that they wanted to know all about the European peculiars, about the ymbrynes, about Miss Peregrine. They were convinced the ymbrynes were planning some sort of invasion or attack. They wanted to know how many other peculiars we’d kidnapped from America. How many ferals we’d lured away. I told them none, and that we had acted alone and without the ymbrynes’ knowledge. And I repeated what I’d said to Leo: We’d answered a call to help an uncontacted peculiar who was in danger. We wanted to help her, and that was all.

“In danger from what,” my interrogator asked. He was a big guy with unshaven jowls and chalk-white hair.

I figured there was no harm in telling them, so I described the people who’d been stalking her. The SUVs with blacked-out windows. The helicopter above the