A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)

by Ransom Riggs

It had been my choice to leave Devil’s Acre. To go home again, where my friends couldn’t follow. I had hoped that in returning I might sew together the disparate threads of my life: the normal and the peculiar, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

“It’s a pocket loop,”

“The time you loop isn’t the point of a pocket loop. The advantage is their extremely small size, which makes them a snap to maintain. Unlike a normal loop, these only need to be reset once or twice a month, as opposed to daily.”

With this pocket loop, you can live in one world without cutting yourself off from the other.

“You see, I’m the majordome of this house, as well as the general overseer of the Panloopticon and its many portals.”

“Children, this is Miss Isabel Cuckoo. She’s an old, dear friend of mine, and she also happens to be the ymbryne in charge of high-level reconstruction assignments.”

Enoch had his hand raised. “My talent is hypnotizing ladies with my good looks. What have you got for me?”

😂🤢

“I thought I’d never understand boys,” said Bronwyn, shaking her head. “But now I think I’ve got it. They’re all idiots!”

😂👏🏼

Miss Cuckoo laughed. “Not at all, but that is intentional. None of our displaced wards are comfortable in Devil’s Acre, so neither should we be. This way, everyone is motivated to keep the reconstruction effort moving along efficiently, so we can get out of here and back to our loops as quickly as possible.”

The Ymbrynes are so considerate and caring. 🥹

“Yes, miss. Photography. I’ve already got a handheld flash . . .”

She held up her palm and sparked a flame. Miss Cuckoo laughed.

The room was dominated by a huge black conference table embossed with the ymbrynes’ official seal—a bird with a watch dangling from its mouth, one talon pinning down a snake.

Miss Peregrine sat down on my other side. “We want you to share your story.”

My grandfather had never asked the ymbrynes’ permission to do his work, and I didn’t need their permission to continue it. That Abe had left his logbook for me to find was permission enough.

Ooh, rebellious teenager…

“We’re a binary,” she explained. “Sometimes we’re confused for a dual-personality person, but we actually have two hearts, souls, brains—”

Miss Peregrine took me aside. “We’ll have a talk very soon, just you and me,” she said. “I’m very sorry if your feelings were stepped on in our meeting. It’s very important to me, and all the ymbrynes, that you feel fulfilled. But the American situation is, as we mentioned, a sticky one.”

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

Such a mom!

The way people rejected anything that didn’t fit their narrow paradigm of acceptability, as if those who thought or acted or dressed or dreamed differently from them were a threat to their very existence.

I remembered where I had seen that clerk’s face before.

His name was noted as Lester Noble, Jr.

They had spent no more than a few sporadic hours in the present, and those were mostly on Cairnholm, where time had practically stood still even as the calendar changed.

They came from a time before the concept of teenager-hood even existed. That was an invention of the postwar years, before which you had been either a child or an adult.

“Look at this!” he said, turning to an old man who happened to be pushing a cart nearby. “Look at it!”

“Okay, it’s a lot of cheese.” “It’s the pinnacle of human achievement,” he declared seriously. “I thought Britain was an empire. But this—this—is world domination!”

“Now, if you wouldn’t mind letting go of Horatio . . .” He muttered under his breath in hollowspeak, and I felt my control over the beast vanish. “I promised him a hot meal if he was good today. Didn’t I, fella?” The hollow reeled in its tongues, scampered over to him, and sat down by his feet like a big puppy.

H went on, twisting the end of his short beard between his fingers as he spoke. “There were twelve of us. We led normal lives, to all appearances. None of us lived in loops—that was a rule. A few of us had families, regular jobs. We met in secret and communicated in code. At first we just went after hollows, but when the ymbrynes had to go underground because the wights were picking off so many of them, we started doing the jobs they couldn’t do anymore.”

“In our group, four of us could see hollows. It was only Abe and I who could control them to any degree. And you’re the only one I’ve ever heard of who’s been able to control more than one at a time.”

“Been real busy, Norma.” “Sure, sure.” “Is she an ymbryne?” said Emma. “Some people call us demi-ymbrynes,” Norma said, “but I think loop-keeper rolls off the tongue better. I can’t turn myself into a bird or make new loops or anything fancy like that, but I can keep open ones going a good long time. Pay’s okay, too.”

The hollowgast ran to chase a stray cat,

“In my opinion, we’re much too concerned with what Miss Peregrine thinks,” said Emma.

Rebellious teenager

“I wonder if Abe was even his real name,” she said.

While Emma and I were gone, Miss Peregrine had returned from her all-night meeting in the Acre and collapsed in her bed upstairs—one of the rare times I’d known her to actually sleep. We

“Exactly!” said Millard. “The headmistress still treats us like children. We’re all nearly a century old, for bird’s sake, and it’s about time we started acting our age. Or half our age, anyway. We’ve got to start making decisions for ourselves.”

My peculiar friends had changed, I realized, but Miss Peregrine’s way of parenting them had not.