The Desolations of Devil's Acre (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #6)

by Ransom Riggs

There was a meter somewhere inside me, a confidence gauge, a bravery indicator, and every time I touched her it bounced upward.

“I, too, am angry, but now isn’t the time to dissect the lapses that led to this moment. There will be time for that once this crisis has passed. We may not have long to organize a defense, and if we waste time squabbling, we will live to regret it. Or die to regret it, as the case may be.

As she looked past us to scan the room, I saw a new kind of fear in her eyes. It said everything had changed.

She said it like she needed it to be true. Mind control sounded a lot more problematic to me than one bad apple succumbing to Caul’s poisonous rhetoric, but to the ymbrynes, a traitor was infinitely worse. Loyalty was everything; we were supposed to be family.

Aside from Pennsylvania, USA, there was a call placed to Slovenia, one to the Andaman Islands off the western coast of Thailand, one to Namibia in southern Africa, one to the Amazon basin in Brazil, and one to the Kelardasht region of northern Iran.

It's so cool to think about the different loops all around the world

Desperation could make good people do bad things . . . and morally ambivalent people do really bad things.

As if guns would do any good against a proto-demon like Caul, or whatever he’d become; I was pretty sure a flying slug of metal wasn’t going to stop him.

“You know the story of that bone clock? It’s a very special piece of peculiar horology.”

I'll bet this story ends up being important

I still missed my grandfather, though it was a low, background kind of ache. But certain memories could sharpen the ache until it became, momentarily, unbearable.

She could make me feel so much with just a word or two—because I never doubted she meant them. She was never fake with me, never for a second. She was guileless without being naive. Two more line items on a growing list of things I loved about her.

As if nothing ever happened was a sweet-sounding fairy tale. My parents would never be the same. Their lives had been turned upside down, inside out, blendered on liquify. Even if they didn’t remember the most upsetting chunks of the last year—assuming they hadn’t already sustained some kind of brain damage from all these memory-wipes—the scars would never fade.

Bronwyn looked mortified. “Cripes. Sorry. Pretend you’re at the cinema and it’s just a scary film, that’s what I do.”

I love Bronwyn, she's so adorable

“It’s easy to forget what freedom means when you already have it,”

“When you’re as old as I am, coffee’s practically the only thing keeping you alive.”

That doesn't require being old lol

From a vast room filled with hanging racks, Gaston, the costuming department director, chose period-appropriate outfits for each of us, all shades of brown and green that would blend into the turned earth of a battlefield, and hopefully attract minimal attention from either the British and French soldiers near Miss Hawksbill’s loop, or the Germans after we crossed the front lines.

1) That costume room sounds SO cool 2) They're most definitely getting caught

I leaned into her, just a little, just briefly. Just friends. Though I loved her still, in a dimmed and dusty way.

We had, as usual, little choice but to entrust our lives to a person who in the normal world would be considered deeply unwell.

“Seven may shut the door.” The doll was whispering to Sophie again. “That is, any of you are enough to fulfill the prophecy all on your own. You don’t need seven. Only one.”

How many people would spend their lives among shades and ghosts, were they able? Every parent who’d lost a child, every lover who’d lost a mate: If they had the choice, wouldn’t most do the same? We’re all riddled with holes, and there were days when I would’ve done anything to patch mine, if just for a while.

Addison hopped onto a blasted stump for a better view. “‘Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me,’” he recited. “This is no time for poetry,” Emma said,

We left the platform area for the vast ticket hall, which looked like a sci-fi cathedral where people came to worship fast food.

This thing between us was still new, still forming, and I worried that if we starved it now it would wither, never to be revived. But there was no time for dinner and a movie. Hardly even a minute to talk to each other, let alone hang out—something more important, be it planning or fleeing or fighting or catching a rare hour of sleep, was always taking precedence. Maybe one day, if this fighting ever came to an end, I could love Noor Pradesh the way she deserved to be loved.

“Just because no one remembers your name doesn’t mean your life wasn’t worth something.”

“It won’t have been a waste, even then,” Millard said, “because we’ll be the ones who fought. Years from now, when whatever peculiars Caul decides to keep alive have to pledge allegiance to his evil empire, they’ll gather in private to tell the story of the ones who fought to stop him. And perhaps it will inspire them to try again.”

We talked through the plan, which was alarmingly light on detail and depended altogether too much on chance and luck.

I cursed myself for letting Noor and Emma come with us. Now they would die needlessly, when the only sacrifice required was Horatio and me. And at that moment I would have happily given my life to rid the world of every last hollow. But no victory was worth Noor’s life, or Emma’s.

Horatio is going to die, calling it right now

We were not superheroes. We were not born fighters, but had been forced into the role. We were simply peculiar.

It felt, in that moment, like we were a million miles apart and as close as we’d ever been.

“Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.”

In the end, our real home had always been one another. And a real home was all I’d ever wanted.