We accepted the glasses but kept them far from our mouths. Still, it seemed clear to me that this boy wanted us to flatter him, so I played along.

  “This all sounds amazing,” I said. “How do you keep them so fresh? Do they sleep in refrigerators?”

  I looked at Noor and forced a laugh. She got the idea and manufactured a chuckle.

  “Ha-ha. Oh no.” Josep’s mood was improving. “They’re part of the loop, and their bodies reset along with it. They all died peacefully in their beds in the night, and the loop was made the next morning.”

  “They all did?” I said. “How?”

  “There was an accident at the chemical plant. A deadly compound went airborne and the town’s entire population suffocated in their sleep. The adults, anyway; the kids were mostly away at camp . . .”

  “Oh my God,” I breathed. I was sure I’d gone pale.

  “A tragedy, yes,” he said. “But thanks to one quick-witted ymbryne and an enterprising deadriser, a wonderful learning laboratory was born. Not only do the townspeople allow us innumerable opportunities to practice our craft, but we’ve made them useful in other ways, as you can see. They wait on us. Cook, clean, serve as bodyguards.” He smiled, the first time I’d seen him do that. “Look at me, getting carried away. We don’t receive many visitors other than our own kind, and I admit I’m rather proud of what we’ve built here. This is the future, as I see it. The world’s dead vastly outnumber its living. Why not harness their power?”

  “You have a lot to be proud of.” I set down my untouched lemonade. “You’ve worked hard to create this place. But the wights will destroy it if you let them.”

  Josep sighed. He was about to say something when a little girl poked her head through the doorway.

  “Excuse me, Josep.”

  We turned to see two more kids enter the room: a cute little girl in a blood-splattered apron and rubber boots who looked about ten, and a boy in a wheelchair, not much older. The chair was being pushed by a stooped woman in a bright yellow housedress, her mouth slack and her eyes rolled back in her head.

  Josep frowned at them. “Eugenia, Lyle, I told you to stay in your rooms until this was over.”

  “Are they really here to make the strangers leave?” the little boy said hopefully.

  “We are,” Noor said.

  “And their monster?” the girl added, tears springing to her eyes. “It was outside my room last night. I think it could smell me.”

  Josep was about to snap at them, but then his face changed, and he turned to me.

  “I’m not about to let anyone destroy this place,” he said. “But I’m also not going to allow more unknowns in on your word alone.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “What can I do to prove I’m telling the truth?”

  “The strangers brought two hollowgast with them. One stays with them up on Gravehill, to guard them while they’re working. The other patrols the town, to make sure we don’t cause them any trouble.” He took a step toward me. His gaze intensified. “I’ll let your people in on one condition.”

  “Name it,” I said, a prickle of dread awakening in my gut.

  “Prove you are who you say.” His eyes flashed quickly to the little girl. “If you really have a special talent for hunting these monsters, dispose of this one. Then I’ll allow your people to enter.”

  A charge of fear went through me, but there was hope there, too. Hope that I might be stronger than I thought. Better. Braver.

  Noor grabbed my hand.

  “You’ve got this,” she whispered.

  I said, “Take me to the place you last saw it.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Thirty-two of Hopewell’s dead were gathered on the front lawn, in what I hoped would look—to a hollowgast, anyway—like a sort of garden party. Josep had agreed to lend us a hand, and he and three other deadriser kids were controlling the dead: Lyle and Eugenia, peeping from the windows of the big Victorian house; and Josep and suspenders boy, from the small house across the street. Noor and I were hidden down the block, sunk low in the front seat of the biggest car I could find, a 1940-something Dodge Deluxe that had a front end like a battering ram.

  The hollow that patrolled the town made predictable rounds, Josep had said, and the heavy trails of hollow residue I found in the street outside his big Victorian house confirmed that he had been up and down this particular block many times. I had also realized that my inner compass was confused because there were two hollows in this loop: one who felt familiar to me and the other new. When I imagined them as distinct, it became easier to resolve each of their signals. If these were the same wights who had escaped from Devil’s Acre, they were probably still traveling with the hollow they had taken from the Panloopticon basement; that, I hoped, was the familiar signal. He felt distant. Probably up on Gravehill with the wights. The hollow patrolling the town was close—and getting closer.

  Noor, as expected, could not be persuaded to let me handle this alone, and truth be told, I didn’t want to face this without her. So I hadn’t fought her on it.

  We sat together in the Dodge, slouched just high enough to see over its yachtlike steering wheel, our eyes fixed on the far end of the street. Waiting. The dead milled about, staggering around the grass in lazy circles.

  Every so often we heard another deep faraway boom as the wights continued their excavations.

  My stomach was turning knots.

  “They must be losing their minds out there,” Noor said. “Our friends, I mean.” She had scraped a stripe of light from the air and was squeezing it from one fist to the other.

  She started humming. The same melody again.

  “Does it have words?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It’s something I learned as a kid,” she said. And then she looked up, slightly surprised, as if she’d just realized something. “It was Mama who taught it to me.”

  “Really?”

  “‘Sing it when you’re troubled,’” she said. “‘It’ll make you feel better.’” She looked at me. “It almost always does.”

  And then, a few seconds before I saw it, I felt it. I stiffened, leaning forward until my chin was resting against the wheel.

  Noor stopped humming. “You see it?”

  And then I did—he lumbered from behind a house and into view, way down the block.

  “There. See his shadow? Damn, he’s an ugly one.”

  That didn’t quite do him justice. This was maybe the biggest, foulest hollowgast I’d ever laid eyes on: He was easily nine feet tall, two feet of which were just his gaping black mouth. His sharp, pointed teeth were so long they were visible even from this distance, and his three tongues, fat as jungle pythons, were pinwheeling in the air around him. And this hollow, unlike others I’d seen, had hair—long, stringy, black, hanging down in matted patches from his scabbed head. He looked like chaos walking, a nightmare come to life. Which was the point; his job was to keep the deadrisers terrified and pacified. While they couldn’t see it like I could, the unmistakable, thrashing shadow it cast, like a sea monster grafted onto a giant ape, was nearly as terrible as the beast itself.

  I watched it weave from one side of the street to the other, tear a mailbox from the ground with its tongues, and fling it through the window of a house.

  “What’s it doing?” Noor said.

  “Walking toward us. Trying to be scary.”

  “Is it working?”

  Goose bumps rose along my arms. “Yeah. It’s working.”

  I stuck the key I’d found under the visor in the ignition. The car started with a rumble. The hollowgast froze in the middle of the road—turning its tongues at me like three periscopes—and then walked fast in our direction.

  I slid the gearshift into drive, but kept my foot planted on the brake.

  The hollowgast was three houses away from the garden party of the damned, and now it was speeding up, using its tongues to propel itself farther, faster.

  He continued toward us.

  Two houses away.

  I honked the horn three times. Inside the houses, the deadrisers would now be mumbling and whispering and clicking their tongues, just as we’d planned.

  The dead stopped circling the lawn and turned toward the street. All at once they reached into their waistbands and bent down to the grass to retrieve knives and cleavers. One guy, still in his fuzzy slippers, picked up a garden hoe. They swayed and wobbled on dead feet for a few seconds, then flooded into the street to intercept the hollowgast.

  I didn’t expect them to kill it. They were just the first wave.

  The hollow tried to sweep the dead away with its tongues, but there were too many. They fell upon it with their knives, hacking and slicing blindly. The hollow screeched, but it seemed more irritated than wounded, and it set to dispatching its antagonists one or two at a time: One was bitten in half; another had his neck snapped; a third was hurled onto, and impaled by, a picket fence.

  “My God,” Noor said, laughing nervously. “He’s destroying them.”

  “Now it’s my turn,” I said. I lifted my foot off the brake and stomped down on the accelerator. The wheels let out a squeal as the car fishtailed, then found its grip and shot forward. We were thrown back in our seats. The road ahead was strewn with bodies and gore, but the hollow was still stumbling around, trying to peel off the last clinging few.

  “Hold on!” I shouted.

  We braced for impact.

  The sound it made was loud and wet, a multipart crunch. One of the dead bounced off the windshield, spider-cracking it, and two more went flying in the air. The hollow roared with pain and surprise—we’d hit it while its back was turned—and it was thrown forward onto the pavement. A moment later it got caught under the fender of the car, its horrible body dragging along the ground.

  The front-right tire blew. I slammed on the brakes. The car swerved wildly, spun around, and the back window shattered before we came to a full stop.

  Noor turned to stare at me, afraid.

  “You okay?” she said, her eyes quickly searching me for cuts and bruises.

  I nodded, quickly scanning her. “You?”

  “Do you think it’s—”

  A sudden smack rocked the car. The Dodge’s nose lifted a few feet off the ground, then fell back with a terrific jolt.

  “Time to get out!” I said, and we both opened our doors and flung ourselves onto the asphalt as the car lifted, then slammed down a second time. The hollow had gotten stuck beneath the rear wheels, and it was writhing and wriggling, trying to free itself. I shouted at Noor to get clear of its tongues, and thankfully, this time, she listened to me and backed off to the sidewalk.

  I stood in the middle of the street, staring down the beast.

  Lie still, I tried saying in hollowspeak.

  The words came out in a jumble—not quite English, not quite Hollow. The creature paid me no attention.

  Stop, I tried again. Lie still.

  Better—all hollowspeak that time. But the creature was too busy bench-pressing the Dodge with its tongues; it hadn’t even bothered to scrape off the last dead townie that clung to it, a weaponless man in bloodied pajamas who clawed at it uselessly with his hands.

  I repeated myself a few more times while walking slowly toward it.

  “Please be careful!” I heard someone cry out—Eugenia, from the window of that house.

  The hollow finally succeeded in flipping the car, and it came crashing down on its roof with a fantastic glass-and-metal crunch.

  Stay down, I tried. Stay down.

  It sat up.

  Don’t move.

  It peeled the clawing dead man from its torso and pitched him headfirst into a telephone pole. And then the hollow stood. It had a crushed leg and broken teeth and was weeping black blood from dozens of small wounds, but all that seemed to have only made it angry. It had only two tongues to fight with—the third it was using as a crutch for a mangled leg—but that was twice the number it needed to kill me, and I was well within their grasp.

  I wished, wished, wished that this had been the hollow I knew, that’d I’d already controlled, the one from the Panloopticon and the blood-sport ring. I could practically snap my fingers and that hollow would fall into line behind me. But no, of course not. Nothing could ever be easy.

  Stop. Sit. Sit down, I chanted.

  There was a flicker of hesitation in its body language, but no more than that. It shot one of its tongues at me. It wrapped twice around my waist and chest, knocking the air from my lungs.

  “Jacob!” Noor screamed.

  “Stay back!” I tried to say, but the tongue was squeezing out my breath. Noor was coming toward me, and so were two of the deadriser kids, out of their houses now, trailed by a few more dead.

  “No,” I tried to shout, but it came out as a cough. “Don’t get close!”

  The hollow was pulling me toward it, my feet dragging along the ground. Maybe this hollow was different from others I’d fought and tamed? Bigger, stronger, its mind armored. Maybe the wights had learned something from their encounters with me in Devil’s Acre and—I don’t know—updated the hollows’ brain firmware somehow?

  “Let him go, you bastard!” I heard Noor shout.

  That got its attention. The hollow paused, then turned, and that’s when I saw what she’d made: a churning pool of darkness that spanned the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, in the middle of a sunny day. Her voice had come from somewhere inside the blackness. It was large enough to create a visual screen—and strange enough to confuse a hollowgast.

  It whipped its free tongue into the darkness, toward Noor’s voice. My heart nearly burst—but the tongue came back, having connected with nothing.

  “Not even close!” Noor taunted, her voice slightly to the right now.

  The hollow struck again, and again hit nothing.

  “Missed again! You suck!”

  The hollow was annoyed and distracted enough that it loosened its grip on me ever so slightly, and I was able to speak again, and start whispering at it in hollowspeak.

  Let me go, sit down, stop.

  The hollow struck again, this time swinging its tongue horizontally through the darkness like a baseball bat, and again my chest constricted in sudden fear for her life—but Noor must have thrown herself to the ground.

  I heard her shout, “We want a batter, not a broken ladder!”

  It struck once more, fast, and this time there was the sickening noise of impact, and a woman’s voice going ughhhh.

  My chest tightened and I screamed, “STOP!” in English, but it didn’t help—the hollow reeled in its catch from the shadow.

  But it wasn’t Noor.

  It was the dead girl from the house—the Elvis Presley fan—and as the hollow hoisted her up to get a better look, she started singing some old Elvis song in a scratchy, tuneless voice.

  The hollow roared in anger, and the girl, without drama or expression, took out a knife she’d been hiding in her pocket and plunged it into the hollow’s right eye.

  It screamed, the noise loud enough to echo. And then the hollow bit off her head and tossed her flopping body onto a roof.

  Let me go, I shouted in the stunned silence that followed. The hollow’s spine stiffened. It cocked its head toward me like a dog hearing its master whistle.

  Let me go, I said again—and this time it set me down on the street and unwrapped its tongue from around my waist.

  Thank. God.

  The knife in its eye seemed to have weakened it, in both body and mind. I wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass.

  Close your mouth.

  It slurped its three tongues back into its mouth and snapped its jaws shut, and without its crutch it began to wobble, then fell into a sitting position.

  The darkness suddenly evaporated, and there was Noor, picking herself up from the pavement where she’d been lying facedown, and relief flooded through me.

  “That was way too close,” she said, her eyes searching me. “Jesus, are you okay? Can you breathe?”

  “I will be,” I said, and coughed. “Don’t come any closer.”

  She didn’t.

  Put your hands on your head.

  The hollow did as it was told.

  “Can you make him roll over and beg for treats?” asked Lyle, wheeling cautiously through the doorway of the house.

  “I think he’s had all the snacks he can handle,” Eugenia said.

  I felt the hollow go limp. He’d stopped resisting me.

  “It’s safe,” I said. “He’s under my control now.”

  Noor dashed into the street, leaping over strewn bodies, to throw her arms around me. “You were amazing,” she said. “Amazing.”

  “You were,” I whispered. “If you hadn’t done what you did . . .”

  “I didn’t even think. I just did it.”

  “You scared the hell out of me, though. Please don’t tease hollows.” I almost—almost—laughed. “They really hate it.”

  The deadriser kids had come out of their houses and closed some of the gap between us, but stayed at a cautious distance.

  There were more deadrisers, too, watching from the windows of the houses nearby, but only the ones we’d already met were willing to step into the street.

  Josep ventured into the midst of the massacre. He looked deeply impressed.

  “I’d heard the hollow-hunters were no more, so when you said you were one of them, I assumed you were lying. But you appear to be the genuine article.”

  “Now will you let the others in?” I said.

  “I’ve already unsealed the door.”

  And from the street behind us I heard a welcome sound. My name, as shouted by Bronwyn Bruntley.