Ransom Riggs - Hollow City

Miss Wren was shouting, begging us to comply—“Do as they say or they’ll hurt you!”—but she wouldn’t let go of Althea’s body, so they made an example of her; they tore Althea away and kicked Miss Wren to the ground, and one of the soldiers fired his machine pistol into the ceiling just to scare us. When I saw Emma about to make a fireball with her hands, I grabbed her by the arm and begged her not to—“Don’t, please don’t, they’ll kill you!”—and then a rifle butt slammed into my chest and I fell gasping to the floor. One of the soldiers noosed my hands together behind me.

I heard them counting us, Caul listing our names, making sure even Millard was accounted for—because of course by now, having spent the last three days with us, he knew all of us, knew everything about us.

I was pulled to my feet and we were all pushed out through the doors into the hallway. Stumbling along next to me was Emma, blood in her hair, and I whispered, “Please, just do what they say,” and though she didn’t acknowledge it, I knew she’d heard me. The look on her face was all rage and fear and shock—and I think pity, too, for all I’d just had snatched away from me.

In the stairwell, the floors and stairs below were a white-water river, a vortex of cascading waves. Up was the only way out. We were shoved up the stairs, through a door and into strong daylight, onto the roof. Everyone wet, frozen, frightened into silence.

All but Emma. “Where are you taking us?” she demanded.

Caul came right to her and grinned in her face while a soldier held her cuffed hands behind her. “A very special place,” Caul said, “where not a drop of your peculiar souls will go to waste.”

She flinched, and he laughed and turned away, stretching his arms above his head and yawning. From his shoulder blades jutted a weird pair of knobby protrusions, like the stems of aborted wings: the only outward clue that this twisted man bore any relation to an ymbryne.

Voices shouted from the top of another building. More soldiers. They were laying down a collapsible bridge between rooftops.

“What about the dead girl?” one of the soldiers asked.

“Such a pity, such a waste,” Caul said, clucking his tongue. “I should have liked to dine on her soul. It’s got no taste on its own, the peculiar soul,” he said, addressing us. “Its natural consistency is a bit gelatinous and pasty, really, but whipped together with a soupçon of remoulade and spread upon white meat, it’s quite palatable.”

Then he laughed, very loudly, for a long time.

As they led us away, one by one, over the wide collapsible bridge, I felt a familiar twinge in my gut—faint but strengthening, slow but quickening—the hollowgast, unfrozen now, coming slowly back to life.

Ten soldiers marched us out of the loop at gunpoint, past the carnival tents and sideshows and gaping carnival-goers, down the rats’ warren of alleys with their stalls and vendors and ragamuffin kids staring after us, into the disguising room, past the piles of cast-off clothes we’d left behind, and down into the underground. The soldiers prodded us along, barking at us to keep quiet (though no one had said a word in minutes), to keep our heads down and stay in line or be pistol-whipped.

Caul was no longer with us—he had stayed behind with the larger contingent of soldiers to “mop up,” which I think meant scouring the loop for hiders and stragglers. The last time we saw him, he was pulling on a pair of modern boots and an army jacket and told us he was absolutely sick of our faces but would see us “on the other side,” whatever that meant.

We passed through the changeover, and forward in time again—but not to a version of the tunnels I recognized. The tracks and ties were all metal now, and the lights in the tunnels were different, not red incandescents but flickering fluorescent tubes that glowed a sickly green. Then we came out of the tunnel and onto the platform, and I understood why: we were no longer in the nineteenth century, nor even the twentieth. The crowd of sheltering refugees was gone now; the station nearly deserted. The circular staircase we’d come down was gone, too, replaced by an escalator. A scrolling LED screen hung above the platform: TIME TO NEXT TRAIN: 2 MINUTES. On the wall was a poster for a movie I’d seen earlier in the summer, just before my grandfather died.

We’d left 1940 behind. I was back in the present.

A few of the kids took note of this with looks of surprise and fear, as if afraid they would age forward in a matter of minutes, but for most of them I think the shock of our sudden captivity was not about to be trumped by an unexpected trip to the present; they were worried about having their souls extracted, not about developing gray hair and liver spots.

The soldiers corralled us in the middle of the platform to wait for the train. Hard shoes clicked toward us. I risked a look over my shoulder and saw a policeman coming. Behind him, stepping off the escalator, were three more.

“Hey!” Enoch shouted. “Policeman, over here!”

A soldier punched Enoch in the gut, and he doubled over.

“Everything good here?” said the closest policeman.

“They’ve taken us prisoner!” said Bronwyn. “They aren’t really soldiers, they’re—”

And then she got a punch to the gut, too, though it didn’t seem to hurt her. What stopped her from saying more was the policeman himself, who took off his mirrored sunglasses to reveal stark white eyes. Bronwyn shrank back.

“A bit of advice,” the policeman said. “No help is coming to you. We are everywhere. Accept that, and this will all be easier.”

Normals were starting to fill the station. The soldiers pressed in on us from all sides, keeping their weapons hidden.

A train hissed into the station, filled with people. Its electric doors whooshed open and a glut of passengers spilled out. The soldiers began pushing us toward the nearest car, the policemen going ahead to scatter what few passengers remained inside. “Find another car!” they barked. “Get out!” The passengers grumbled but complied. But there were more people behind us on the platform, trying to push into the car, and a few of the soldiers who’d been ringing us had to break away to stop them. And then there was just enough confusion—the doors trying to close but the police holding them open until a warning alarm began to sound; the soldiers shoving us forward so hard that Enoch tripped, sending other children tripping over him in a chain reaction—that the folding man, whose wrists were so skinny he’d been able to slip his cuffs, decided to make a break for it, and ran.

A shot rang out, then a second, and the folding man tumbled and splayed onto the ground. The crowd swarmed away in a panic, people screaming and scrambling to escape the gunshots, and what had been merely confusion deteriorated into total chaos.

Then they were shoving us and kicking us onto the train. Beside me, Emma was resisting, making the soldier who was pushing her get close. Then I saw her cuffed hands flare orange, and she reached behind her and grabbed him. The soldier crumpled to the ground, shrieking, a hand-shaped hole melted through his camo. Then the soldier who was pushing me raised the butt of his gun and was about to bring it down on Emma’s neck when some instinct triggered in me and I drove my shoulder into his back.

He stumbled.

Emma melted through her metal cuffs, which fell away from her hands in a deformed mass of red-hot metal. My soldier turned his gun on me now, howling with rage, but before he could fire, Emma came at him from behind and clapped her hands around his face, her fingers so hot they melted through his cheeks like warm butter. He dropped the gun and collapsed, screaming.