“You are one of us,” Emma said. “You’re our family.”
“We love you, Jacob,” said Olive.
“It’s been quite something knowing you, Mr. Portman,” Miss Peregrine said. “You would’ve made your grandfather very proud.”
“Thanks,” I said, getting emotional and a bit embarrassed.
“Jacob?” said Horace. “May I give you something?”
“Of course,” I said.
The others, sensing that something private was unfolding between us, began to murmur amongst themselves.
Horace came as close to the hollow as he could bear and, trembling slightly, held out a folded square of cloth. I took it, reaching down from my high place on the hollow’s back.
“It’s a scarf,” said Horace. “Miss P was able to smuggle me a pair of needles, and I knitted it while I was in my cell. I reckon that making it kept me from going mad in there.”
I thanked him and unfolded it. The scarf was simple and gray with knotted tassels on the ends, but it was well made and even had my initials monogrammed in one corner. JP.
“Wow, Horace, it’s …”
“It’s no great work of art. If I’d had my book of patterns I could’ve done better.”
“It’s amazing,” I said. “But how did you know you’d even see me again?”
“I had a dream,” he said, smiling coyly. “Will you wear it? I know it isn’t cold, but … for luck?”
“Of course,” I said, and wrapped it clumsily around my neck.
“No, that’ll never stay on. Like this.” He showed me how to fold it in half lengthwise, then loop it around my neck and back through itself so that it knotted perfectly at my throat and the loose ends hung neatly down my shirt. Not exactly battle-wear, but I didn’t see the harm.
Emma sidled up to us. “Did you dream about anything besides men’s fashion?” she said to Horace. “Like where Caul might be hiding?”
Horace shook his head and started to answer—“No, but I did have a fascinating dream about postage stamps”—but before he could tell us more, there was a noise from the corridor like a dump truck crashing into a wall, a sonic thud that shook us to the marrow. The big bunker door in the end of the room blew open, flinging hinges and bits of shrapnel into the opposite walls. (Thankfully, everyone had been standing clear of it.) There followed a blank moment while the smoke cleared and everyone slowly uncrouched themselves. Then, through the ringing of my ears, I heard an amplified voice say, “Send the boy out alone and no one gets hurt!”
“Somehow I don’t believe them,” said Emma.
“Definitely not,” said Horace.
“Don’t even think about it, Mr. Portman,” said Miss Peregrine.
“I wasn’t,” I replied. “Is everyone ready?”
Murmurs of assent. I moved the hollows to either side of the door, their great jaws hinging open, tongues at the ready. I was about to launch my surprise attack when I heard Caul’s voice through a PA in the hallway: “They have control of the hollows! Fall back, men! Defensive positions!”
“Damn him!” Emma cried.
The sound of retreating boots filled the corridor. Our surprise attack had been spoiled.
“It doesn’t matter!” I said. “When you’ve got twelve hollows, you don’t need surprise.”
It was time to use my secret weapon. Rather than a welling-up of tension before the strike, I felt the opposite, a loosening of my full and present self as my awareness relaxed and split among the hollows. And then, while my friends and I hung back, the creatures began hurling themselves through the jagged, blasted door into the hall, running, snarling, jaws gaping, their invisible bodies carving tunnels in the curling bomb smoke. The wights fired at them, their gun barrels flashing, then fell back. Bullets whizzed through the open doorway and into the room where I and the others were taking cover, cracking into the wall behind us.
“Tell us when!” Emma shouted. “We’ll go at your word!”
My mind in a dozen places at once, I could muster hardly a word of English in reply. I was them, those hollows in the hall, my own flesh stinging in sympathy with every shot that tore theirs.
Our tongues reached them first: the wights who had not run fast enough and the brave-but-foolish ones who’d lingered to fight. We pummeled them, smacked their heads into the walls, and a small number of us stopped to—here I tried to disconnect my own senses—to sink our teeth into them, swallowing their guns, silencing their screams, leaving them gashed and gaping.
Bottlenecked at the stairs at the end of the corridor, the guards fired again. A second curtain of bullets passed through us, deep and painful, but we ran on, tongues flailing.
Some of the wights escaped through the hatch. Others weren’t so lucky, and when they’d stopped screaming we tossed their bodies clear of the stairs. I felt two of my hollows die, their signals blanking from my mind, the connection lost. And then the corridor was clear.
“Now!” I said to Emma, which at the moment was the most complex speech I could manage.
“Now!” Emma shouted, turning to the rest of our group. “This way!”
I drove my hollow into the corridor, clutching at its neck to keep from being thrown off its back. Emma fell in behind me with the others, using her flaming hands as signals in the smoke. Together we charged down the hall, my battalion of monsters before me, my army of peculiars behind. First among them were the strongest and the bravest: Emma, Bronwyn, and Hugh, then the ymbrynes and grumbling Perplexus, who insisted on bringing his heavy Map of Days. Last came the youngest children, the timid, the injured.