“So? What did old bonnie Blackbird want?” Enoch asked.

  “The nerve of her, asking you to fetch another hollowgast,” Emma fumed, “as if you were just some expendable errand boy!”

  I saw Farish eyeing me with interest. “Jacob! A few questions!”

  “Let’s talk somewhere else,” I muttered to my friends, steering them away. The last thing I needed was to end up in the Muckraker.

  “You never mentioned you were famous,” Noor said, eyeing me playfully.

  “Local celebrity,” Emma said proudly.

  “Flavor of the week,” Enoch grumbled.

  Bronwyn smirked. “That’s what you said last week.”

  We walked down Oozing Street, past the slaughterhouse turned B and B and a pub called the Shrunken Head, and when it seemed like we’d put enough distance between us and prying ears, I told them what the ymbrynes had asked of me.

  “Are you going to do it?” asked Horace.

  “Of course,” I said. “If the wights are up to something, we need to find out what it is.”

  “Knowing them, they’ve been up to whatever it is for quite a while,” said Emma. “Now they’re just putting the wheels in motion.”

  “They wanted to break out of jail, just like all prisoners do,” Enoch said. “That doesn’t mean they have some evil agenda.”

  “The wights always have an evil agenda,” Millard said.

  He had disrobed at some point, and I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  Enoch dismissed Millard with an ehh, then looked at Noor, and said, “What about her?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Noor shot him a look. “Yeah, what do you mean?”

  “I thought you were helping her, Portman.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “How are you going to do that while you’re chasing after escaped wights?”

  “I’ll do both—”

  “I can handle myself,” Noor cut in. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Enoch. “What would you do if a grimbear attacked you?”

  “A what?”

  He winked at me. “Exactly.”

  Noor’s expression turned to stone.

  “A grimbear would never attack a peculiar child like us,” said Bronwyn. “They only go after—”

  “Thank you, Bronwyn, we know,” I said. “And shut up, Enoch.”

  Enoch had embarrassed her, and I worried I’d only made it worse.

  “So, do you think the wights might actually have had inside help?” said Millard, oblivious as usual to the emotional dynamics of the conversation.

  “They must have,” said Bronwyn. “That prison is solid as a mountain—I should know, I helped build it with my own hands. The only way they could’ve made that hole in the wall and gotten their hands on an explosive is if someone in Devil’s Acre helped them. But who?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Emma. “The list of suspicious characters around here is longer than my arm. Could have been ex–Ditch pirates, mercenaries, ambrosia addicts . . .”

  “I thought most of them got run out of town,” Enoch said.

  “Most of them,” Emma replied. “I think some of them are covering up their past and are just pretending to be on the ymbrynes’ side.”

  “Some peculiars aren’t even pretending anymore,” said Millard. “Look at this.”

  He had stopped in front of a cart selling newspapers. Most were from the present, brought in weekly from outside the loop to keep us (sort of) up-to-date on the goings-on of the larger world, but there were a couple of peculiar newspapers, too. One was the Muckraker, and its headline read:

  YMBRYNES BUNGLE LOOP SECURITY; WIGHTS ESCAPE

  I snatched a copy from the rack. “How did they already print this?” I marveled. “It just happened!”

  “Special edition,” said the boy behind the cart.

  “An old acquaintance of mine works for the Muckraker,” Horace said mysteriously. “Once in a while he gets advance word of things.”

  I kept reading. A smaller opinion article below the fold was titled: ARE YMBRYNES TOO FOCUSED ON AMERICA’S PROBLEMS TO SOLVE OURS?

  I was too angry to read it.

  “Look at this,” said Emma, drawing my attention to a billboard wall where the escaped wights’ mugshots had just been posted. WANTED FOR MURDER was emblazoned across the top, and a long list of their crimes and aliases trailed below.

  “Don’t they look a rough crowd,” said Horace. “Wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley at night.”

  “They don’t scare me,” said Enoch. “These two are mild as milk. Like bank tellers.”

  I saw the wights he was talking about. One had thin round glasses and a long nose; the other looked downright professorial. The other two looked like brawlers, especially the one on top, who had a thick nose, wiry hair, and was the only one with pupils—fake though they were. They were aimed upward and to the left, which gave the man an unsettling air of total ease, as if he were daydreaming about his next vacation. Or how he was going to strangle the photographer in the night.

  The name printed below his mugshot: P. MURNAU.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  There was an announcement made over a loudspeaker that things were to go on as usual, and all peculiars would be expected to report to their jobs or classes.

  Of course, we would be doing no such thing. We had much bigger fish to fry.

  “I think we can see Miss Avocet today,” Horace said to Noor. “But I’ll need to make an appointment. She’s awfully busy. I might be able to get us in this afternoon, if I beg.”

  “Please do beg, Horace,” said Bronwyn.

  “And if that doesn’t work, threaten,” said Millard. “If the rest of you could lend your hands and your eyes to me, it would help a great deal. I’ve got a few hundred loop maps to comb through in the peculiar archives, and at this stage it’s all hands on deck.”

  “Of course,” Emma said.

  “I’m all yours,” said Bronwyn. “I’ll go fetch Olive and Claire, too. I’m sure they’ll want to help.”

  “We’re in, obviously,” I said, trading a nod with Noor.

  Emma narrowed her eyes at me. She nearly wagged a finger when she said, “Unless, of course, the ymbrynes need you. Right, Jacob?”

  “Right,” I said, trying to keep my voice mild. Emma had been acting weird ever since Noor arrived, but I decided to let it go.

  Luckily, Noor didn’t seem to notice. Either that, or she didn’t much care. She turned toward Millard’s half-clothed ghost and said, “Do you have any specific ideas? Or are we just searching blindly?”

  “Not exactly blind,” Millard replied. “I snuck out late last night and had a midnight chat with a friend. You remember Perplexus Anomalous?”

  “You bothered him at midnight?” Enoch snorted.

  “People as old as Perplexus hardly sleep,” said Millard. “And ever since we saved him from aging forward, he’s been very friendly toward me.” Millard sounded proud of himself, and I could see why: He was making friends with one of his heroes. “Anyhow, I told him about our puzzle and the map fragment and the ex-hollowgast’s mumbled clues, and Perplexus pointed out that if V’s loop is in America—and it seems quite likely that it is—and if it is beset with large windstorms—as the phrases ‘in the big wind, in the heart of the storm’ would seem to imply—then it would make the most sense to search the midwestern United States. There’s a rather wide stripe down the center of the country that’s known colloquially as ‘Tornado Alley.’”

  “Of course,” Noor said, nodding. “Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas . . . the Wizard of Oz states.”

  “What about you?” Bronwyn said, tossing Enoch a look.

  He frowned. “I’d been imagining what a morning of relaxation and leisure might look like, if I’m being honest. Though I suppose that ship has sailed.”

  “How would you relax around here, anyway?” I said.

  “Oh, the Acre has its pleasures. I could always view a hanging . . . or have a mud bath in Fever Ditch . . .” He gestured to the muddy stream beside us.

  And on that depressing note, our group started to disperse.

  “Hey, Enoch was joking, right?” Noor whispered to me.

  “I think so?”

  And then something wet hit me in the back with a splat.

  “There he is!” someone shouted as I spun around, and a gob of mud struck me square in the chest. “Go back to where you came from, phony!”

  It was Itch, the half-fish half-man, who held a nasty grudge against me. He was standing waist-deep in the creek, lobbing gobs of muck in my direction.

  “Stop that!” Bronwyn shouted. She looked around for something to toss back at him, but she wasn’t fast enough. A lady Ditch dweller chose that moment to rise from the mire and throw her own clump of mud in our direction.

  “Loop freedom for all!” the woman shouted.

  This one hit both me and Noor, who was standing too close to me.

  My friends were all yelling at them, and Emma sparked a ball of fire in her hand and was waving it at them menacingly, but there wasn’t much we could do other than scurry out of throwing range—which we did. I was dripping with the stuff. Noor less so, but she’d gotten hit, too.

  “What the hell is their problem?” Noor said, scraping mud from her shirt.

  “They’re just angry and bitter that none of us have to worry about aging forward anymore,” Bronwyn said.

  “You two had better wash that stuff off, and good,” said Enoch, wrinkling his nose. “It’s toxic.”

  “I could definitely use a shower,” I said, looking down at myself.

  “You quite seriously need one, I’m afraid,” said Millard. “This section of Fever Ditch is infested with flesh-eating microbes.”

  “Flesh-eating what?” I said, horrified.

  “Don’t worry, they’re slow,” Enoch said. “It would take them probably a full week to eat you whole.”

  “Okay, yeah, a shower would be good,” Noor said, looking a bit freaked out.

  I caught Bronwyn inching away from us.

  “You need hot running water and soap,” said Enoch. “But the only place you’ll find that is . . .”

  Emma and Enoch looked at each other.

  “There is one possibility,” Emma said, worrying her bottom lip, “though it’s slightly complex and just a little bit risky.”

  “We don’t exactly have a choice, do we?” I said, glancing apologetically at Noor. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to need all of our skin, whatever we do.”

  Enoch shrugged.

  Noor looked miserable.

  And Emma was backing away from us as she shouted directions to a safe house just outside the Devil’s Acre loop, in present-day London. It had modern bathrooms, hot water, the works.

  “We’ll be at the Mapping Department in the ministries building,” Millard said. “Meet us there when you’re clean. Just make sure you get every bit of that stuff off you.”

  “Yeah,” said Enoch. “Because I, for one, enjoy having skin.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Noor and I went down to the boat dock at Fever Ditch, trying not to think too much about the microscopic bugs slowly devouring our skin, and in exchange for a silver coin that Horace had given me, a grizzled old boatman piloted us down the slow black river in a glorified canoe. Rather than talk in front of a stranger we were mostly silent, and Noor spent much of the trip holding her nose and gazing up at the crumbling tenements we passed, where washerwomen hung laundry from the windows and raggedy kids shouted down the alleys.

  “They’re normal,” I said. “Part of the loop.”

  Noor seemed fascinated. “You mean they do the same thing every day?”

  “Every second of every day,” the boatman rasped. “I been here seventy-two years and I know it all.”

  He jerked the tiller and the boat turned sharply left. A moment later, a boy running across an overhead footbridge tripped and fell into the water a few feet to our right, just where we would have been.

  “Now he’ll call that other mucksnipe a pigeon-livered ratbag,” the boatman muttered.

  The boy surfaced. “You pigeon-livered ratbag!” he shouted at someone up on the footbridge.

  Noor shook her head. “That’s wild . . .”

  As we approached the long, dark tunnel that marked the loop exit, Noor started humming. The melody was sweet and simple, like a nursery rhyme, and I could see her shoulders relax as she hummed it.

  I meant to ask her about it, but then the dark enveloped us.

  We were gripped by the sudden rush of a loop changeover, and after a few seconds we emerged into a much-changed London, this one comprised of glass-walled buildings and clean streets.

  The boatman dropped us at the bank without a word, happy to be rid of us.

  We followed Emma’s directions. We made a few turns, crossed a wide shopping street crowded with businesses and buses, made another turn down a residential block, and soon we were there: a simple two-story house on a street of nearly identical houses, all connected. I’d been keeping a keen feel out for hollows, because you never knew, but I’d felt no twinges out of the ordinary.

  We rang the bell. A man I didn’t know answered. He wore a black suit and apron just like Ulysses’s—another Temporal Affairs minion. He looked us over for a moment, asked our names, then let us inside.

  Miraculously, there were two bathrooms.

  Nothing in my life had ever felt so good. I stood under the hot spray while the mud and grit and flesh-eating microbes ran off me and spiraled down the drain, I hoped, then I scrubbed my skin until it hurt. I dried myself with a heavy white towel, found a new razor and an unopened stick of deodorant in the vanity—and my heart sank a little as I realized we had only our dirty, Ditch-stained clothes to change back into.

  Just then came a knock at the door, and the man who had let us in told me there was a wardrobe of clothes in the next room, and I could choose anything I liked.

  I wrapped a towel around my waist and went out to explore my options. I found a hunter-green button-up shirt that fit well, a pair of dark pants, and some brown lace-up ankle boots—an outfit I hoped would blend into various time periods.

  I went out into the living room. Noor hadn’t emerged yet, so I stood at the window and watched the street for a minute—the mailman pushing his cart from house to house, an old man walking a dog—and I marveled at how such a profoundly mundane world could exist right next door to ours.

  “Hey,” I heard Noor say, and then I casually turned and saw her walk into the room, and for a moment I couldn’t believe it was the same person I’d arrived with. She’d put on a simple white henley shirt and blue jeans, and her hair was brushed and shining, and she was beautiful. We’d been mired in filth and running for our lives for so much of the time we’d been together, I had almost forgotten just how beautiful she was. This took me so by surprise, I realized, that I didn’t have time to hide my reaction, and now—oh God—I was staring at her.

  I cleared my throat. “You, uh . . . you look really nice,” I said.

  She laughed, and I think she was blushing. “You do, too.”

  There was a moment of silence which probably lasted only two or three seconds but felt infinite, and then she said, “Well, uh, we should probably be getting back, huh?”

  A sudden clanging filled the house. The minion from Temporal Affairs dashed into the room.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “The doorbell,” he replied.

  Someone was ringing it like the end of the world was upon us.

  The minion ran downstairs to answer it, and a short time later, after a thunderous noise of feet pounding up the stairs, Hugh and Emma appeared, out of breath.

  “You need to come back,” Emma said.

  “We tried to call but the line was engaged,” said Hugh.

  “What’s going on?” I said, trading a worried look with Noor. “Did you find V’s loop?”

  Noor looked hopeful, but Emma was shaking her head. “Not yet,” she said. “It’s Horace. He’s with Miss Avocet right now. When he told her what he was after, she met with him right away. And they’re waiting for us.”

  “Apparently they found something,” Hugh said. “Something big. But they wouldn’t say what.”

  We were all tripping over one another to reach the stairs.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Emma and Hugh had a boat waiting for us at the dock, and this one had a motor on it. Emma barked at the boatman to drive like his life depended on it, and a minute later we were flying through the loop entrance so fast my head was spinning. We left a wide brown wake behind us in Fever Ditch, and had to hang on to the sides of the boat to keep from falling out, and when we finally docked in the center of town, I’d never been so happy to touch dry land.

  Miss Avocet’s office was inside the peculiar ministries building, formerly St. Barnabus’ Asylum for Lunatics, Mountebanks, and the Criminally Mischievous. We rushed through its busy lobby with its registration windows and glum-faced bureaucrats, then up a few flights of stairs to a hallway.

  Someone came rushing out of a door and ran straight into me, and papers went everywhere.

  “No, no, drat! I had these all in order!” he said, and he’d already dropped to his knees to gather them up when I saw who it was.

  “Horace!” Noor said. “It’s us!”

  He looked up sharply, his eyes a bit wild. He had papers poking out from under his arms and up in the brim of his hat like feathers, and between that and his overly formal tuxedo, he looked like a bewildered peacock.