A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,47

true you go where you like and will never age forward? That your internal clocks have reset?”

“That was two questions,” said Enoch.

“Yes, it’s true,” said Emma.

“I see,” Itch said. “And when can we have our clocks reset?”

“Who’s we?” asked Horace.

Four more heads popped up from of the water around him—two young boys with fins on their backs, an older woman with scaled skin, and a very old man with wide, fishy eyes, one on each side of his head. “My adoptive family,” Itch said. “We’ve been living in this cursed Ditch and breathing its polluted water for far too long.”

“Time for a change of scenery,” the fish-eyed man croaked.

“We want to go somewhere clean,” said the scaly woman.

“It’s not that easy,” said Emma. “What happened to us was accidental, and it could have killed us.”

“We don’t care,” said Itch.

“They just don’t want to share their secret!” said one of the finned boys.

“That’s not true,” said Millard. “We aren’t even sure if the reset could be re-created. The ymbrynes are still studying it.”

“The ymbrynes!” The woman spat black water from her gills. “Even if they knew, they’d never tell. Then we’d all leave their loops and they’d have nobody left to lord over.”

“Hey!” Claire shouted. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

“Downright treasonous,” said Bronwyn.

“Treason!” shouted Itch, and he swam to the edge and pulled himself up onto the pavement. We edged away from him as the water ran off his body, revealing a coat of long green algae that covered him from chest to feet. “That’s a dangerous word to bandy about.”

The boys pulled themselves up out of the Ditch and so did the woman—she was similarly clothed in algae—leaving only the old man in the water, swimming agitated circles.

“Look,” I said—I hadn’t spoken yet, and thought maybe I could calm things down. “We’re all peculiar here. There’s no reason to fight.”

“What do you know about it, newcomer?” said the woman.

“He thinks he’s our savior!” said Itch. “You’re nothing but a phony who got lucky.”

“False prophet!” shouted one of the boys, and then the other boy shouted it, too, and then they all were—“False prophet! False prophet!”—while closing in on us from three sides.

“I never claimed I was a prophet,” I tried to say. “I never claimed I was anything.”

Dozens of normal tenement-dwellers had leaned out of the windows of the building behind us, and now they were shouting, too, and raining garbage down on our heads.

“You people have been in that Ditch for too long!” Enoch shouted back. “Your brains are polluted!”

Emma started to light a flame and Bronwyn looked ready to take a swing at Itch, but the others pulled them back. We were watched closely in Devil’s Acre, and hurting another peculiar, even in self-defense, would have looked very bad.

The dripping Ditch dwellers had backed us into an alley, their cries of “false prophet” turning into demands that we give up our secret. Finally, we had no choice but to turn and run, their shouts echoing after us as we turned a corner.

Somehow we found our way out of the dangerous part of town and back to the center, though everything after was a bit of a blur; we were shaken, and the friendly hellos and handshakes that came at us as we parted the crowd near Bentham’s house felt unreal.

What was behind all those smiles?

How many of them secretly resented us?

Then we were in the Panloopticon, getting waved through peculiar customs, plodding quietly up the stairs and down the long hall, everyone silent, in their own heads.

* * *

• • •

We packed into the broom closet, then stumbled, after a lurching rush, out into a hot Florida night. Faint steam rose from the shed’s peaked roof, accompanied by a light hissing sound, like a hot engine cooling down.

“Ozone,” said Millard.

“Twenty-two minutes forty seconds.” Miss Peregrine was standing in the yard, arms crossed. “Is how late you are.”

“But, miss,” said Claire, “we didn’t mean to—”

“No one say anything,” Emma hissed. Then, louder, “We tried a shortcut but got lost.”

We stood there in the yard, exhausted, still freaked out from our encounter at the Ditch, and endured a lecture about punctuality and responsibility. I could hear my friends’ teeth gritting. Once she’d made it overabundantly clear that she was disappointed in us, Miss Peregrine assumed bird form, flew to the top of my roof, and perched there.

“What just happened?” I said in a low voice.

“That’s what she does when she needs to be alone,” said Emma. “She must be