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

by Ransom Riggs

Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable. —Rebecca Solnit “The Blue of Distance” A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Noor herself seemed the only concrete evidence that what I was experiencing now was more than just some purgatorial memory hole, the last-gasp fireworks of a dying brain.

And it struck me, in a way that seemed both obvious and profound, that what I felt for this strange, small woman was love. I clung to her for another moment after Noor disengaged from a nervous hug, both to assure myself she was there and because I was realizing with some astonishment how frail she seemed through the voluminous folds of her dress. It frightened me how much weight rested on such slight shoulders.

“When I heard Velya was hiding in America, I did wonder if she’d made her own loop, so that she could hide without having to entrust her whereabouts to another person. But I never suspected she would create such a dangerous one, intentionally, as a means of defense. It’s brilliant, really.”

“I trust them about as far as I can throw them,” said Enoch. “Me too,” agreed Bronwyn. Enoch rolled his eyes. “You could throw them a long way.” “It’s true,” she said. “I have a trusting nature.”

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.

But the worrying truth was that most peculiars’ abilities were not well-suited to combat. We weren’t soldiers. We weren’t superheroes. In the face of an organized assault, the best most of us could do was to hunker down and hope for the best. Maybe ten percent of us could muster any kind of aggressive defense. It’s why we needed the home guard, relatively useless as they were. And why we’d depended for so long on the protection of ymbrynes and their loops.

It took a lot of energy to be fussed over, and to have to reassure other people that I was okay when really my neck hurt and my head ached and I was feeling a little shaky. Knowing how I really felt would make them nervous, and concealing it took energy I didn’t have.

It occurred to me that this one had been sent here not necessarily to kill me. Caul knew by now that I could handle a single hollowgast—even an evolved one. It had been a warning. Give up now. Before I send an army of them.

Across the Ditch, the ymbrynes began to sing in Old Peculiar and walk slowly in a circle. “Hope they don’t collapse the place by accident,” Enoch whispered to a pretty, curly-haired girl standing beside him in the crowd, and she looked so alarmed Enoch had to reassure her that he was kidding.

Out on the streets, people were laughing. Distantly, someone sawed away at a violin. People were trying to forget the sword hanging over them, the wolf at their gates, if only for an evening.

She slipped her arms around my waist from behind and my hands rose instinctively to grip hers. How something so simple could feel so reassuring was both a mystery and a miracle.

“‘’Tis better to have fought and lost, than never to have fought at all,’” Addison said, reciting again. “‘Better to burn out than to fade away,’” said Emma. “Hey hey,” I said. “My my,” she replied.

“Because you are the librarian. And your power is even greater than you know.”

My destiny is here. I can’t run from it anymore. I’ll find you again, if it’s meant to be. I really hope it is. Love, Noor

“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.”

When the last ymbryne was laid inside and the door had been sealed, the crowd was ushered so far back from the building I half expected it to explode. Instead, Miss Peregrine made a loud birdcall and a massive flock of starlings circled down from the sky, then flooded through the holes in the roof. There was a great commotion inside. “What are they doing?” I whispered to Enoch. “Picking their bones clean,” he replied, his eyes rimmed with tears. “They’ll be powdered and made into medicines. Ymbryne bones have many uses and it’s a crime to waste them.” It was fitting. An ymbryne’s life was one of endless service. Even in death they had a job to do.

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

“That’s all right, love, have a cry.”

Cairnholm was no longer a golden prison. It wasn’t a life sentence of postcard-perfect days you could never escape. We could leave anytime we liked. Or not at all.