“I’ve just come from Bentham’s secret office,” said Millard, “and I think you’d better come back there with me now.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Bentham’s secret office was directly above his regular office, accessible via a ladder hidden in the ceiling. The ladder was concealed behind a large portrait of himself, one of many that covered the ceiling (but not, oddly, the walls). At the top of the ladder we discovered a cell fit for an ascetic monk: There were bookshelves crammed with books, a rolltop desk, and a single hard chair.

  Bentham’s old manservant, Nim, was waiting nervously in a corner as, one by one, we all climbed up.

  “I’ve never seen this room before,” Miss Peregrine said, turning slowly to look around. “Goodness, I asked Miss Blackbird and her people to search every inch of this house . . .”

  “Nim knew about this place,” said Millard, and the strange little man began to nod. “And so, apparently, did the wights.”

  “Mr. Bentham kept all his most sensitive papers and books here,” Nim said, “away from peekers and sneakers, but he trusted old Nim, that’s right.” Nim was worrying his hands, picking away the skin of his fingertips while his eyes darted around the room. “It was Nim’s job to dust, straighten, alphabetize, catalogue-ize . . .”

  “Can you please get to the part about the wights resurrecting Caul?” Emma said.

  “And what any of this has to do with Fiona?” Hugh growled.

  Millard cleared his throat. “Yes—so. Everyone’s always said it’s impossible to escape a collapsed loop. All the experts who’ve studied it agree: Either it kills you, turns you into a hollowgast while flattening everything for hundreds of miles—as happened at the Tunguska Event of 1908—or, if you’ve just happened to imbue yourself with the soul of one of the most powerful ancient ones, as Caul did just before we collapsed the Library of Souls, then you’re trapped forever in phenomenon we call esoteric sequestration—”

  “Get to the point, Mr. Nullings,” Miss Peregrine said.

  “Everyone agreed it was impossible. Or nearly everyone. But apparently Bentham did not.” Millard nodded at Nim. “Go on. Tell them.”

  Nim shuffled forward, still picking at his hands. “Mr. Bentham didn’t want to do it. But Mr. Caul forced him to.”

  “Forced him to what?” Miss Peregrine said.

  “Find a way for someone to escape a collapsed loop.” He glanced up furtively, as if expecting to be slapped, then looked down again. “Mr. Caul hounded Mr. Bentham about it for years. I remembers. I hears things. Nim was always listening. Nim’s my name.”

  “And did he?” I said. “Find a way?”

  “Nat’rally he did! Mr. Bentham’s a genius. But he lied to Mr. Caul about it. Told him it couldn’t be done. But he wrote down the secret formula he’d found and put it in a book, because ‘discovery is discovery,’ he said, and he gave it to old Nim to hide, and told me not to ever tell him where I’d stashed it so it couldn’t be tortured out of him, if it ever came to that.”

  “Let me guess,” Enoch said. “You did a crap job of hiding it.”

  “No, sir, no, no, no, I didn’t—but they found it anyway.”

  Millard stepped in. “After the wights broke out of prison, but before they left Devil’s Acre, they came here—to this room—and they stole a single book. The one with Bentham’s formula in it.”

  Nim pointed out an empty space on a shelf. “Thievin’ bastards.”

  Emma tossed up her hands. “That’s terrible. Awful. But how does any of this help us to stop them—”

  “Or find Fiona?” Hugh said. He seemed ready to tear his hair out.

  Miss Peregrine had seemed oddly calm through all this, and now she glided across the floor to Nim and laid her hands gently upon his shoulders. He flinched.

  “Nim,” she said, smiling like people do at children. “Did you happen to make a copy of Bentham’s formula?”

  He looked at her hand on his shoulder, then at her. “Mr. Bentham himself did, yes,” he said. “Asked me to hide both of them.”

  The smile grew wider. “And do you still have that copy?”

  “Oh yes, ma’am.” He blinked, confused. “Would you—would you like to see it?”

  “Yes, Nim, I would.”

  Nim went to the rolltop desk and unlocked it. It was crammed with disorganized papers. As he riffled through them, Noor raised a hand and said, in a tone that seemed calculated not to offend, “Can I just ask something?”

  We all looked at her.

  “Why are we so sure his formula would actually do anything? Just because the wights are desperate enough to try it doesn’t necessarily mean it will work. Was this guy, like, some kind of wizard?”

  Enoch rolled his eyes. “There’s no such thing as a wizard.”

  Noor seemed ready to argue the point when Millard jumped in.

  “It’s a fair question,” he said. “Understandable, too, given you never knew him.”

  “Bentham was like . . . the architect,” I said, and Noor crooked an eyebrow at me.

  “Loop science was his area of speciality,” Millard explained. “He designed the Panloopticon, for example. And he was responsible, we now know, for the collapse that turned Caul and his followers into hollowgast—and the one that trapped both himself and Caul in the Library of Souls . . .”

  “Okay, I get it,” Noor said, holding up her hands. “He knew his stuff.”

  “Quite,” Miss Peregrine said, but she was looking a bit green, and she was staring at Nim.

  Nim extracted a single wrinkled piece of paper from the desk and was now waving it in the air. “Here, here, here!”

  Miss Peregrine took it from him and began to read.

  Her brow furrowed almost immediately. “Is this a joke?”

  Horace leaned over to peek at it. “Quail eggs . . . jellied eels . . . cabbages . . .”

  “Oh no, that’s a grocery list,” Nim said, hands fluttering as he reached for the paper and turned it over in the ymbryne’s hands. “Other side.”

  She began to scan it. Her expression became unreadable.

  Bronwyn turned to Millard and whispered, “Seems an odd place to write something important.”

  He shushed her.

  Miss Peregrine’s eyes were scanning the paper.

  You could’ve heard a pin drop.

  Then she exhaled. Some of the color had left her face. “Yes,” she said quietly. “This explains a great deal, indeed.”

  And then she collapsed to the floor.

  Everyone rushed to help: Bronwyn lifted Miss Peregrine into her arms, Millard fanned her with a book, Emma snapped a small flame before her eyes, and Horace ran to find her a glass of water. In a few seconds she was blinking and talking again, asking what time it was and whether the tea had been boiled; when she realized what had happened, she got embarrassed and chastised us to put her down immediately. The moment we did she nearly fell over again.

  “It was the soup, that’s all,” she said as Bronwyn and Noor steadied her. “I had a bad reaction to that awful soup.”

  No one, not even Claire, believed her.

  She had shown us she was afraid and now she was overcompensating, because her fear had made us all afraid.

  After she’d had some water and a minute to regain her composure, she sat down at Bentham’s desk. We were dying to know what was on the back of Bentham’s grocery list. She flattened it before her—it was wrinkled and stained with something that looked like coffee—and she said, “I don’t want to keep you in undue suspense—so sit and listen.”

  We sat around her in a circle on the floor, like kindergartners at the most stressful story time imaginable. Noor sat close to me, her proximity a balm even as she clenched and unclenched a nervous fist through the air in front of her, collapsing and reviving the light.

  “The top line is written in Latin,” said Miss Peregrine. And then she read it—in Latin. Noor and I exchanged a look, but no one else seemed bothered.

  I raised a hand before Miss P moved on.

  She peered at me.

  “Um.” I cleared my throat. “Can you translate, please?”

  Even now, in the middle of all of this, Miss Peregrine found the time to pause long enough to look disappointed in me. “Really, Mr. Portman,” she said, shaking her head. And then:

  “It says, ‘To summon a soul from deep in the pit, you will need, well, all of it.’”

  “Your brother was no poet,” said Millard.

  “And with that, the list begins.” She cut her eyes at me. “In English. There are only six items.”

  What followed was not so unlike the list of groceries written on the reverse, only these ingredients were more esoteric and disturbing.

  “One: castings of the uberworm.”

  “Uberworm.” My head snapped toward Emma and Enoch, who were already looking over at me. “What was it Ellery said they took from her?”

  “Her Maderwurm,” said Enoch. “Which I can only guess is—”

  “A big, nasty worm,” said Emma.

  Bronwyn blew out her breath. “So, that’s one ingredient they have.”

  “Shall I read on?” Miss Peregrine said.

  “Two: tongue of the seedsprout, freshly harvested.”

  “What’s a seedsprout?” asked Olive.

  Miss Peregrine looked pained. “Fiona,” she said. “It’s an archaic term for her type of peculiar.”

  Hugh’s face fell into his hands.

  “Harvested fresh,” Millard said. “Which must be why they’re keeping her alive—”

  “Millard, please,” Miss Peregrine hissed. “I’m sorry, Hugh—”

  “Go on, keep reading,” he said. He uncovered his face, eyes red. Bronwyn wrapped an arm tight around him, and kept it there.

  “Three: an indestructible flame.”

  We traded murmurs, trying to figure it out.

  “Could that mean Emma?” Horace guessed.

  Enoch let out an audible gasp.

  “Perhaps if I were immortal.” Emma shook her head. “But I’m not indestructible, so how could my flame be?”

  And then it came to me. “The boy in the blankets, in Locust Gap.”

  Emma’s eyes lit up. “Yes! He was horribly cold and used to have a thing that kept him warm—a flaming rock in his stomach . . .”

  “The sparkstone,” Miss Peregrine said, cocking her head at Emma curiously. “There is only one in the world.”

  “And some wight stole it months ago,” Emma said.

  We hadn’t told Miss Peregrine about the boy, but she understood immediately and nodded in resignation. “That’s three they have.” She returned to the list. “Four: death beetles of the Underground Hittites.”

  Nim’s hands clapped over his mouth. “Oh.”

  We all turned toward him.

  “What is it?” Millard said sharply.

  Nim’s cheeks had gone pink. “They were under glass in Mr. Bentham’s collection. Until the other night.”

  “When they were stolen by Murnau and his cronies,” I guessed.

  “Well, um, given the timing of their disappearance,” he stammered, “yes, yes, I’m afraid so . . .”

  Groans and murmurs went up. Enoch swore. Noor had gone very still and quiet. Millard was muttering to himself that this was worse, much worse, than he’d thought, and Miss Peregrine pinched the bridge of her nose and squeezed her eyes shut, as if chasing away a bad headache.

  “My God,” Horace said, panic rising in his voice. “They’ve collected nearly everything on the list! What’s left?”

  “Please, everyone, we mustn’t lose our heads,” said Miss Peregrine. “There are two items remaining.”

  The room went silent. She flattened the paper on the desk again and squinted at it uncertainly, like she couldn’t quite decipher Bentham’s handwriting.

  Then she said: “Five: the Alphaskull of the Well of Hope (powdered, five to ten milligrams).”

  Everyone was frozen, watching the others. Waiting for bad news. Waiting for someone to say that the wights already had the Alphaskull, or that alphaskulls were so common they practically grew on trees, or that alphaskull (powdered, 5–10 mg), was so easy to find it was sold in bulk at Costco, and the only thing standing in between the wights and the resurrection of Caul was a Costco Club membership card.

  But no one was saying anything.

  “What’s the Well of Hope?” Noor ventured finally.

  We all looked to Miss Peregrine. “I’ve no idea.” She turned to Enoch. “Mr. O’Connor—you’re our expert in all matters thanatotic. Ever heard of an alphaskull?”

  Enoch shook his head blankly.

  Miss Peregrine shrugged. “One left, then. Six: beating heart of the mother of birds.” There were audible gasps. She looked up quickly. “And before you jump to any—”

  “That means you, miss!” cried Claire.

  “They’re going to come for you!” Horace wailed.

  “Horace, Claire—stop that!” Miss Peregrine snapped. “It does appear to reference an ymbryne, but I’m not the eldest, nor even the maternal figure amongst us. If anyone, that’s Miss Avocet.”

  “But you’re our mother, or close as we’ve got,” said Emma.

  “And Fiona’s,” said Hugh, “and she’s on the list, too.”

  “And you’re Caul’s sister,” Millard pointed out. “His actual flesh and blood. It makes a terrible kind of sense that he’d need part of you to come back.”

  I waited for her to argue. For her to tell Millard how mistaken he was.

  But she was quiet. Her eyes searched a blank wall. Then she said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose that does make sense.”

  There was a long, heavy moment, when it felt like we were slipping over the edge. Giving up, giving in to fear.

  And then Hugh spoke.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll never let them take you.”

  And there was such iron in his voice, such unpanicked firmness, that it seemed to pull the rest of us back from the brink.

  “That’s right!” said Olive.

  “Never,” agreed Bronwyn.

  “And if they haven’t come for you yet,” said Millard, “it’s because you’re the hardest bit, and they’re saving you for last. So far as we know, they haven’t got this other piece yet—the alphaskull.”

  “Whatever the hell that is,” said Enoch.

  Miss Peregrine stood up from the desk, steady on her feet now. “Then we will find out what the hell it is,” she said, “and we will stop the wights from getting it.”

  “And get Fiona back,” said Bronwyn.

  “And decorate Devil’s Acre with their heads!” cried Hugh, and a cheer went up.

  For the first time in days, I saw him crack a wavering smile.

  We were now in the frustrating position of having a clear goal—find this skull and the Well of Hope before the wights did—but no clear way to achieve it. Tracking the wights via hollow residue had become nearly impossible; they had fled the scene of the bus accident in a car, presumably, and there was no way of knowing which way they’d gone. Nobody had ever heard of either the skull or the well, and until we had some idea about the location of at least one of them, we were effectively paralyzed. True to form, Miss Peregrine wanted the ymbrynes to handle the entire problem and told us to go back to the house and stay there while she conferred with them. “You must all get some rest,” she said. “We have a fight ahead of us, and I need you in top shape.” And in a great featherburst she assumed bird form and winged off.

  Rest be damned.

  It was unthinkable, anyway, with all this hanging over our heads—so we splintered apart and went to work.

  Millard rushed off to the mapping archive to search American loop atlases for any mention of the Well of Hope. Horace, for whom sleep and work were often the same thing, actually did go back to the house to rest—his plan was to down a dram of “sleeping solution” and put himself into a trancelike slumber, where he hoped to dream the answer we needed. Hugh had been muttering darkly about interrogating the wights who were still imprisoned—“They know something,” he’d said—and threatened to “sting it out of ’em if they won’t talk.” But cooler heads prevailed, arguing that not only would that break a number of ymbryne code laws, but revealing anything about what we knew to wights, even jailed ones, could jeopardize everything.

  Then Claire said she’d worked with some peculiars in the Department of Arcane Fauna who had lived in America years before and ran away to ask them if they’d ever heard of an alphaskull or the Well.

  At which point something obvious occurred to me: “If we think this thing is in America,” I said, “why don’t we just ask the Americans? LaMothe owes me a favor . . .”

  So we made our way to Bentham’s attic and the Marrowbone loop entrance—only to find the elevator blocked by a black-clad wall of Temporal Affairs minions.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Ulysses Critchley said, holding up the flat of his hand like a school crossing guard. “Miss Peregrine just left and gave us strict instructions not to admit you or anyone else. Miss Wren and Miss Cuckoo have been apprised of the situation, and they’re with the Americans now.”

  I was about to start arguing with him when Olive pointed out that Hugh and Enoch were gone. We spun around to look, and she was right.

  Emma was so mad she nearly lit her own shirtsleeve aflame. “I know just where they went,” she growled. “Come on, Bronwyn, let’s stop them before they do something monumentally stupid.”

  Which left Noor, Olive, and me to our own devices. It was clear we weren’t getting into Marrowbone, and anyway, two ymbrynes were more than capable of getting information out of the Americans (if there was any to be gotten). We spent an hour wandering the Acre, feeling helpless.

  We were so close, and yet . . .