“Oh!” he said. “Good! There’s so much to tell. Where to start—”

  We knelt and helped him gather up the papers.

  “So that text H spoke about,” he said, speaking fast. “Miss Avocet knew it. It’s called the Apocryphon—and, as it turns out, it’s a real book.” He stuffed a few papers into a leather folder, which was already overflowing, then stuffed a few more into his vest. “It’s extremely obscure, even in the already-obscure canon of peculiar prophecy. But when I asked Miss Avocet about it, she nearly fell out of her chair. She canceled all her meetings for the rest of the day and convened her best ymbrynes-in-training to work on this. She said she hadn’t heard anyone mention the Prophecy of the Seven, or the Apocryphon, in many years—and she’d been dreading the day she would.”

  With all the papers gathered, he stood up and gestured to the door across the hall, which was twice as large as all the doors near it and labeled with a sign that read E. AVOCET, BY APPT ONLY.

  I went to open the door, but it swung inward with a loud creak before I could reach the handle. It was dark and cavernous inside, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. The back wall was all windows, but they were completely covered over with newspapers so that they filtered only a slight orange glow. The office was lit instead by candles and candelabras—a hundred or more, dancing and twinkling everywhere—and in their dim pools of light I could see nothing but books and girls. Books in spiraling towers, books in laddered shelves to the ceiling, books in piles that tilted at impossible angles but somehow stayed aloft. For every pile there was a studious young woman in a long dress—twelve in all—poring over pages, writing in notebooks, necks bent at painful angles. These were students of Miss Avocet’s ymbryne academy, from which Miss Peregrine herself had graduated a very long time ago. They were so absorbed in their work, they didn’t even glance up at us as we passed.

  We snaked around the piles until we reached an old, familiar face: Miss Avocet, seated at a desk that was drowning in papers.

  “Ah, you’re finally here,” she said. “Come in, young ones. Fanny, make room!”

  What I’d taken for a rug let out a rumbling growl, and a big brown grimbear lumbered up from the floor and slouched off into the corner.

  “Don’t be frightened, dear heart,” Miss Avocet said to Noor. “He’s tame as an emu-raffe, but he acts like he owns the place.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Noor said, though the shock hadn’t quite disappeared from her face.

  Miss Avocet squinted. “I hope you don’t mind the light. Whale oil smokes too much and gas lamps bother my eyes.” Then she invited us to sit on the long velvet couch facing her desk. She pushed a pair of tiny wire spectacles up her nose and leaned forward on her elbows. The welcoming smile she’d greeted us with vanished, and her eyes gleamed with purpose despite their rheumy cataracts.

  “I won’t waste time, as I’ve got little to waste,” she said, her voice shaking slightly. “The Apocryphon, as you might have surmised by its name, is regarded a bit dubiously by scholars of peculiar prophecy—when it is regarded at all. It is little-known. Not even a proper book: It was never written, merely written down. Its full title is The Apocryphon of Robert LeBourge, Revelator of Avignon, but I’ve heard it shortened to The Apocryphon of Bob the Revelator.”

  “What’s a revelator?” Noor asked.

  “It’s a fancy word for prophet,” said Horace.

  “LeBourge was anything but fancy,” said Miss Avocet. “Old Bob was an uneducated farmhand who spoke mainly in babbling incoherencies, and most who knew him thought he was possessed, an idiot, or some combination of the two. But sometimes this man who could hardly speak would tremble as if electrified and hold forth in fully formed quatrains of sonorous, seemingly extemporaneous rhyming verse. That was amazing enough, but when people noticed that his verses sounded like predictions—and some of those predictions came to pass—he became famous, and people began writing down the things he said.”

  “They must have thought he was some kind of angel,” said Noor.

  “Devil, more like,” said Miss Avocet. “He was plunged into boiling oil for the crime of divination, but suffered nothing from it. Another time he was hanged but only pretended to be dead, then escaped from the embalmer’s room. He was peculiar, of course, and one of the more fascinating figures from our history.” She turned her head slightly and said to the room, “Someone could write an excellent term paper on him, if one were so inclined!” Then she returned her eyes to us. “The Apocryphon of Bob is a collection of his pronouncements, recorded by whomever happened to be present at the time.”

  “What about the Prophecy of the Seven?” I asked.

  “The Prophecy of the Seven appears only in a few translations of the text. It seems that speakers of a number of different languages were present at its utterance, and each recorded their own account in their own tongue. There is some disagreement amongst them, and the most widely known version of it is at best an educated guess at what Bob actually said—a necessarily compromised melding of them all, translated into English. Fortunately, my star pupil speaks many of those languages, and has been hard at work untangling the web.”

  An elegant young woman stepped forward, hands clasped around a notebook. She had winglike hair, dark skin, and eyes that radiated intelligence.

  “This is Francesca,” said Miss Avocet, “and if she passes my examinations at the end of this term, which I expect she will, she’ll become Miss Bittern, our newest ymbryne.” Miss Avocet was beaming with pride. Francesca smiled gently.

  “Take it away, lass.”

  Francesca opened a notebook. “The Prophecy of the Seven was written some four hundred years ago,” she began, “but it begins with several references to our own time period. Listen . . .

  And now a word, in uncouth rhyme

  Of what shall be in future time.

  When folk shall fly as birds do now

  And give away the horse and plow,

  And round the world their thoughts will fly

  Quick as the twinkling of an eye.

  When creatures made of shadow creep

  To stalk our children in their sleep

  And ymbrynes cease their flocks to tend . . .”

  She stopped and looked at us over her glasses. “You get the idea.” She flipped ahead a few pages. “After some more of this, it says . . .

  When the prisons are blown to dust

  And chaos reigns

  And the betrayers summon their king

  The old ones from their sleep are torn

  An age of strife will soon be born.”

  A chill traveled through the room, and for a moment even the candles seemed to shiver. Francesca looked up from her notes.

  “And then it goes on to describe a war.

  Every land on earth will sink

  And reek and wallow in stench and stink

  Of rotted trunks of beast and man

  And vegetation crisped on land.”

  “Thank you, Francesca,” Miss Avocet said, “I think we get the picture.” She turned to face my friends and me. “As you can see, old Bob had a flair for drama.”

  “Does that mean the ymbrynes will fail?” Emma asked. “The peace won’t hold?”

  The big room went suddenly silent as all the ymbrynes-in-training stopped turning pages and looked up from their books.

  “Absolutely not,” Miss Avocet said acidly. “Here, let me see that.” Francesca turned over the book, and Miss Avocet flipped through the pages, flustered. “This bit of translation is rather vague . . . It doesn’t necessarily describe a war between peculiar clans, for instance. You have to let me check your work, Frannie.”

  “Of course, ma’am.” Francesca nodded humbly. “Perhaps I made a mistake in the transliterations between Latin, Hungarian, and Old Peculiar—”

  “Yes, that must’ve been it.”

  “I have faith in the ymbrynes,” Francesca felt compelled to say.

  Miss Avocet patted her hand. “I know you do, dear.”

  “But it means something terrible will happen,” said Hugh. “With lots of dying.”

  “What about the seven?” Noor said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, aren’t they supposed to stop this from happening? ‘Emancipate peculiardom’?”

  “But ‘emancipate’ implies something terrible does happen,” said Emma. “And the seven help later.”

  “That bit’s near the end,” said Miss Avocet. “Oh, you read it, your eyes are still young.” She handed the book back to Francesca.

  “Emancipate is another of those fuzzy words,” said Francesca, “though it’s clear that the seven are crucially important. The only line that all the translations agree on is this: ‘To end the strife of war, seven may seal the door.’”

  “The door to what?” Noor said.

  Francesca wrinkled her nose. “Don’t know.”

  “I don’t mean to make this about me,” Noor said. “But does it mention . . . me?”

  “Yes. Near the end,” said Miss Avocet, and she turned a strange, warm smile at Noor, as if she’d been looking forward to this. “It foretells the births of the seven. Well, it begins to, but the text we have does not appear to be complete.”

  “Then how do you know I’m one of them?” said Noor. “Did Bob include my Social Security number, or—”

  “It’s incomplete but for one entry,” Francesca said. “It says that one of them shall be ‘a babe who suckles the light.’”

  I felt a tingle go down my spine.

  Noor looked skeptical. “A babe?” she said. “Like . . . a baby?”

  Now Emma was frowning, too. “Babies don’t have peculiar abilities.”

  Miss Avocet nodded lightly. “As an almost iron-clad rule, they do not. It is exceedingly, exceedingly rare. But it can happen.”

  “I only started being able to do this a few months ago,” Noor said, clawing a bit of light from the air. “So this can’t mean me.”

  “Ah.” Miss Avocet nodded heavily. “Now I must tell you a story. And I think you should sit down while I tell it,” she said to Noor.

  “I am sitting.”

  Miss Avocet pushed up her glasses and squinted at her. “Good.” She tented her fingers beneath her chin, took a brief, dramatic pause, and then began. “Fifteen years ago, a baby was delivered to us. An infant who was clawing out the light from its nursery—and swallowing it.”

  Noor stared at Miss Avocet, completely still.

  “I think that baby was you.” Miss Avocet leaned forward. “Tell me, dear, do you happen to have a little moon-shaped birthmark behind your right ear?”

  Noor took a beat and a long breath and then reached up her hand to brush aside the hair that was covering her ear. There behind it was just the birthmark Miss Avocet had described.

  Noor’s hand began to tremble, and she let her hair fall back into place.

  I felt my chest tighten.

  “It was me,” Noor said quietly, her eyebrows knitted together.

  “Yes. It’s you.” Miss Avocet smiled. “I was wondering when I might see you again.”

  “Oh my,” Horace whispered, his hands clutched to his chest.

  But Noor was shaking her head. “Who brought me here? Where were my parents?”

  “An ymbryne from Bombay brought you to us. She said you weren’t safe there. That your parents had been killed, and you were being hunted.”

  “By who?”

  “Hollowgast, my dear. A particularly vicious strain of them that we had not seen here—until a few months after your arrival, that is. After several attacks, a decision was made that the safest course for everyone, including yourself, would be to send you on to America—in the hope that crossing an ocean might throw the hollows off your scent.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Noor said, beginning to sound a bit exasperated. “I never manifested any abilities until a few months ago. I didn’t grow up able to do this.”

  Miss Avocet lowered her voice a touch and leaned forward on her desk. “Before you went, we gave you an experimental serum that would dramatically reduce your ability and delay its resurgence until young adulthood. You see, the hollows can smell us when we use our powers. So we thought that, in addition to hiding you in America, this would keep you safe for years to come.” She smiled warmly. “I’m gratified to see that it did. What a remarkable young woman you’ve become, Miss Pradesh. I’ve often wondered about you. I was tempted to inquire after you, but I feared doing so might have tipped the wights off to your location.”

  Noor stared at the floor, kneading her temples with her thumbs. “But I didn’t grow up with an ymbryne or around other peculiar kids. I’ve been in foster homes ever since I could remember . . .”

  “Who did you send her to America with?” I asked.

  “It was one of your grandfather’s associates,” said Miss Avocet. “A woman named Velyana.”

  My mouth fell open.

  Noor’s head snapped up. “What did she look like? Has anyone got a picture of her?”

  “I’m sure we’ve got one here somewhere,” Miss Avocet said, waving at Francesca.

  The ymbrynes-in-training leapt to action, and within a minute, a picture of the woman was located. “She’s quite a bit younger in this photo than she would’ve been when she accompanied you,” Miss Avocet said, and as she handed it over, I was able to glance at it.

  It was V, all right—the same portrait of her that the diviners had shown us at their loop in Georgia.

  Noor held it up. After a moment her hand began to shake. “Mama,” she whispered.

  A chill went through me. Through all of us.

  “She took care of me until I was six,” Noor said. “And then she was killed.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Noor paced back and forth in front of Miss Avocet’s desk, turning the picture of V over and over in her hands. “They told me it was a robbery,” she said. “Mama and I were walking at night when some men attacked us. I fell and hit my head. I still have a scar.” She absently touched the hair above her right ear. “I woke up in a hospital. They told me she’d been killed.”

  “You can be sure it wasn’t a robbery,” said Miss Avocet. “And she wasn’t killed. What you experienced was an attack by wights, probably accompanied by a hollowgast. She managed to fight them off, it seems. But when you got hurt she realized she couldn’t keep you safe anymore.”

  “So she gave me up,” Noor said, her voice verging on tears. “And let me think she was dead.”

  Miss Avocet stood and came out from behind her desk. She clasped Noor’s hands. “She had no choice. She knew you would only be safe amongst normals, and any contact with you would’ve put your life at risk.”

  “My God, that must have been so heartbreaking for her,” said Emma.

  “But someone must have looked in on her now and then,” Hugh said. “Maybe it couldn’t have been V, but . . .”

  That gave me an idea.

  I took Miss Avocet aside and asked her if she had any pictures of my grandfather in her archives. Within a short time one was located. It was a snapshot of Abe sitting on the porch of a house peering down the sight of a rifle, taken years ago, Miss Avocet explained, during a loop invasion preparedness drill. I showed it to Noor.

  “He looks a lot younger here, but I think that’s Mr. Gandy.” She looked a bit confused. “Why? Did you know him?”

  My heart skipped a beat.

  Emma crowded in to look, then gasped. “Abe!”

  Gandy had been Abe’s alias.

  “That’s my grandfather,” I said, and now Hugh and Horace were jostling to see the picture, too.

  “He used to check in on me,” Noor said. “I thought he worked for the foster agency!”

  “Abe was checking up on you,” Emma said. “But not for the foster agency.”

  “You’ve been part of our family all along, dear,” Miss Avocet said to Noor. “You just didn’t know it.” And she stood up and wrapped Noor in her frail arms.

  After the ymbryne let her go, Noor took a moment to collect herself, wiping a tear from her cheek.

  “You okay?” I asked her. “This is a lot to process.”

  She nodded quickly and looked up, her eyes full of quiet determination. “She’s alive,” she said. “And I’m going to find her.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “Ahem.”

  I spun around at the sound. Discovering nothing, I tossed a questioning look at my friends, who seemed equally startled. We’d all heard someone clear their throat—loudly—but when we turned to look, there didn’t seem to be anyone there.

  “Millard?” said Emma, realization dawning. “When did you get here?”

  “More to the point,” Miss Avocet said sharply, “how did you get here?”

  “I’ve been here nearly the whole time,” he said. “I came in a bit late, didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “We have strict rules about invisibles sneaking around in the nude, Mr. Nullings.”

  “Yes, ma’am, my humblest apologies.” Millard seemed to be walking toward the little knot of us standing beside Miss Avocet’s desk. “I’m not sure whether Horace told you, but we’re trying to make sense of not just this prophecy, but of a map, too—one that we believe leads to a loop where V currently resides.”

  Miss Avocet raised an eyebrow at Horace. “No,” she said slowly. “Horace had not mentioned that.”

  “There was hardly time, ma’am,” Horace said. “And besides, maps are Millard’s expertise.”

  Miss Avocet merely sighed.

  “So. What’s the news?” Noor asked Millard, her face brightening. “Did you find something?”