A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,39

on the sidewalk.

* * *

• • •

If Emma hadn’t grabbed my hand and pulled me along, I might’ve stayed frozen where I stood. I hardly recognized the place. When I had last seen Devil’s Acre, Caul’s tower was a pile of still-smoking bricks, and wights were fleeing through the streets pursued by angry mobs. There were riots as addicts looted stashes of unguarded ambrosia and the wights’ collaborators burned buildings filled with evidence of their crimes. But that was a while ago, and it looked like the place had made great progress since then. It was still a hellhole at heart—the buildings were caked with grime and the sky was the same poisonous yellow it had always been—but the fires had been put out, the debris cleared away, and there were uniformed peculiars directing horse-and-buggy traffic in the crowded street.

More than the place, though, it was the people who had changed. Gone were the prowling, hollow-eyed addicts, the dealers in peculiar flesh displaying their wares in shop windows, the ambrosia-enhanced gladiators with light beaming from their eyes. Judging from their eclectic and era-spanning costumes, these peculiars hailed from loops across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East—and from many different time periods, as well.

In their hunt for peculiar souls the wights had not discriminated, and their reach had extended much farther than I had realized.

What struck me more than their costumes was the dignity with which they carried themselves, in spite of their circumstances. They had come seeking refuge from damaged and destroyed loops. They had lost their homes, seen friends and loved ones killed before their eyes, suffered unimaginable traumas. But there were no shocked and vacant stares. No one dressed in rags. Each one of them had had a giant hole blown through their lives, but the street pulsed with determined energy.

Perhaps they simply did not have time to mourn. But I preferred to believe that, for the first time in nearly a century, peculiars could do more than just hide in their loops and hope. The worst had come to pass. Having survived it, there was much to do: They had a world to remake. And they could make it better.

For a block or two, I was so absorbed in staring at all of them that I didn’t notice how many of them were staring back. But then someone did a double take, and someone else pointed at me, and I could have sworn I saw my name form on their lips.

They knew who I was.

We passed a young boy hawking newspapers, and he was shouting: “Jacob Portman to visit the Acre today! Hero returns to Devil’s Acre for first time since his victory over the wights!”

I felt my face go hot.

“Why does Jacob get all the credit?” I heard Enoch say. “We were there, too!”

“Jacob! Jacob Portman!” Two teenage girls were following me, waving a piece of paper. “Would you sign this for us?”

“He’s late for an important meeting!” Emma said, pulling me on through the crowd.

We hadn’t gone even ten feet when a sturdy pair of hands stopped me. They belonged to a fast-talking man with a single eye in the middle of his forehead and a hat that read PRESS.

“Farish Obwelo from the Evening Muckraker. How about a quick photo?”

Before I could answer, he had turned me to face a camera—a giant antique that must have weighed a ton. A photographer ducked behind it and held up a flash. “So, Jake,” Farish said, “what was it like to command an army of hollowgast? How did it feel to win a battle against so many wights? What were Caul’s last words before you struck the blow that killed him?”

“Uh, that’s not exactly how it—”

The camera flashed, and for an instant I was blind. Then another pair of hands were on me—this time Miss Peregrine’s, dragging me away. “Don’t speak to the press,” she hissed in my ear, “about anything, but especially not about what happened in the Library of Souls!”

“Why?” I said. “What do they think happened?”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t, because suddenly I was being hoisted up over Bronwyn’s head, where she carried me like a platter, out of reach of the crowd. We made our way like that, Sharon forming a wedge with his arms to part the human sea and pointing up ahead—yes, there, we’re nearly there—to a gate in a tall iron fence. Beyond it rose a building of hulking black stone.

A guard waved us through the gate into a courtyard, and we