Everything blurred and briefly went black. When I came to, my tongue was numb and I tasted blood.
“Tell it to put us down!” Addison was shouting. But now I could hardly speak at all.
“Ahm twying,” I mumbled. I coughed, spitting out a mouthful of blood. “Puhh uff dow,” I said, in broken-tongued English. “Puhh uff—”
I stopped, reoriented my brain. Took a deep breath.
“Put us down on the bridge,” I said in crisp hollowspeak.
I repeated it three more times, hoping it might slip into some furrow of the hollow’s reptilian brain. “Put us down on the bridge. Put us down on the bridge. Put us down on the—”
It gave a sudden bone-rattling roar of frustration, pulled me to the openings in the bridge where it was imprisoned, and roared again, flecks of black spittle spraying my face. Then it hauled all three of us up and hurled us back the way we’d come.
We tumbled through the air for what felt like too long—we were falling now, I was sure of it, arcing downward to our doom—and then my shoulder connected with the hard stone of the bridge, and we slid and skidded all the way down its slope to the bottom.
* * *
We were, miraculously, alive—banged up but conscious, our limbs still connected to our bodies. We’d tumbled down the smooth marble bridge, scattering the pile of heads at the bottom as we rolled to a stop. They were all around now, taunting us as we collected ourselves.
“Welcome back!” said the one nearest me. “We quite enjoyed your screams of terror. What powerful lungs you have!”
“Why didn’t you tell us a hollow was hiding in the damned bridge?” I said, rocking myself up to a sitting position. Pains flared all over my body, from scraped hands, scuffed knees, and a throbbing shoulder that was likely dislocated.
“Where’s the fun in that? Surprises are much better.”
“Tickles must’ve taken a fancy to you,” said another. “He chewed the legs off his last visitor!”
“That’s nothing,” said a head with a shiny hoop earring like a pirate. “Once I saw him tie a rope around a peculiar, lower him into the river for five minutes, then reel him up and eat him.”
“Peculiar al dente,” the third said, impressed. “Our Tickles is a gourmand.”
Not quite ready to stand, I scooted over a few feet to Emma and Addison. While she sat rubbing her head, he tested his weight on an injured paw.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I knocked my head pretty good,” Emma replied, wincing as I parted her hair to examine a trickle of blood.
Addison held up a limp paw. “I fear it’s broken. I don’t suppose you could’ve asked the beast to set us down gently.”
“Very funny,” I said. “Come to think of it, why didn’t I just tell it kill to all the wights and rescue our friends, too?”
“Actually, I was wondering the same thing,” said Emma.
“I’m joking.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said. I dabbed at her wound with my shirt cuff. She drew a sharp breath and pushed my hand away. “What happened back there?”
“I think the hollow understood me, but I couldn’t make it obey. I don’t have a connection with that hollow like I do—did—with the other one.”
That beast was dead, crushed under a bridge and probably drowned, and now I was a little sorry about it.
“How did you connect with the first one?” asked Addison.
I quickly recounted how I’d found it frozen in ice up to its eyeballs, and after a night spent in strangely intimate, hand-atop-head communion I had, apparently, managed to safe-crack some vital part of its neurology.
“If you had no connection with the bridge hollow,” said Addison, “why did it spare our lives?”
“Maybe I confused it?”
“You need to get better at this,” Emma said bluntly. “We have to get Addison across.”
“Better? What am I supposed to do, take lessons? That thing will kill us the next time we get near it. We’ll have to find another way across.”
“Jacob, there is no other way.” Emma raked a veil of mussed hair away from her face and held me with her eyes. “You’re the way.”
I was launching into a creaky rebuttal when I felt a sharp pain in my backside and leapt yelping to my feet. One of the heads had bitten me on the ass.
“Hey!” I shouted, rubbing the spot.
“Stick us back on our pikes like you found us, vandal!” it said.
I punted it as hard as I could and it tumbled away into the crowd of squatters. All the heads began to shout and curse us, rolling about grotesquely with the action of their jaws. I cursed back and kicked ash in their horrible leathery faces until they were all spitting and choking. And then something small and round came sailing through the air and hit me wetly in the back.
A rotten apple. I spun to face the squatters. “Who threw that?”
They laughed like stoners, low and snickering.
“Go back where you came from!” one of them yelled.
I was starting to think that wasn’t a bad idea.
“How dare they,” Addison snarled.
“Forget it,” I said to him, my anger already fading. “Let’s just—”
“How dare you!” Addison shouted, livid, rising up to address them on hind legs. “Are you not peculiar? Have you no shame? We’re trying to help you!”
“Give us a vial or get stuffed!” said a ragged woman.
Addison trembled with outrage. “We’re trying to help you,” he said again, “and here you are—here you are!—while our people are being murdered, our loops torn out root and branch, sleeping before the enemy’s gate! You should be flinging yourselves at it!” He pointed his wounded paw at them. “You are all traitors, and I swear one day I shall see you dragged before the Council of Ymbrynes and punished!”
“Okay, okay, don’t waste all your energy on them,” Emma said, wobbling to her feet. Then a rotten head of cabbage bounced off her shoulder and fell splat to the ground.
She lost it.
“All right, someone’s gonna get their face melted!” she yelled, waving a flaming hand at the squatters.
During Addison’s speech, a group had been muttering in a conspiratorial huddle, and now they came forward holding blunt weapons. A sawed branch. A length of pipe. The scene was turning ugly fast.
“We’re tired of you,” a bruised man said in a lazy drawl. “We’re puttin’ you in the river.”
“I’d like to see that,” Emma said.
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “I think we should go.”
There were six of them, three of us, and we were in rough shape: Addison was limping, Emma had blood running down her face, and thanks to my injured shoulder I could hardly lift my right arm. Meanwhile, the men were spreading apart and closing in. They meant to drive us into the chasm.
Emma looked back at the bridge and then at me. “Come on. I know you can get us across. One more try.”
“I can’t, Em. I can’t. I’m not messing around.”
And I wasn’t. I didn’t have it in me to control that hollow—not yet, at least—and I knew it.
“If the boy says he can’t do it, I’m not inclined to disbelieve him,” Addison said. “We must find another way out of this.”
Emma huffed. “Like what?” She looked at Addison. “Can you run?” She looked at me. “Can you fight?”
The answer to both was no. I took her point: our options were winnowing fast.
“At times like this,” Addison said imperiously, “my kind don’t fight. We orate!” Facing the men, he called out in a booming voice, “Fellow peculiars, be reasonable! Allow me a few words!”
They paid him no attention. As they continued closing off our escape routes, we backed toward the bridge, Emma crafting the largest fireball she could muster while Addison yammered about how the animals of the forest live in harmony, so why can’t we? “Consider the simple hedgehog, and his neighbor, the opossum … do they waste their energy trying to
throw one another into chasms when they face a common enemy, the winter? No!”
“He’s gone completely crackers,” Emma said. “Shut your gob and bite one of them!”
I looked around for something to fight with. The only hard objects within reach were the heads. I picked one up by the last wisps of its hair.
“Is there another way across?” I shouted into its face. “Quick, or I’m throwing you into the river!”
“Go to Hell!” it spat, then snapped at me with its teeth.
I flung it at the men—awkwardly, with my left arm. It fell short. I rooted around for another head, picked it up, and repeated my question.
“Sure there is,” the head sneered. “In the back of a prizzo van! Though if I were you I’d take my chances with the bridge hollow …”
“What’s a prizzo van? Tell me or I’ll fling you, too!”
“You’re about to get hit by one,” it replied, and then three gunshots rang out in the distance—bam, bam, bam, slow and measured, like a warning. Immediately the men who’d been coming at us stopped, and everyone turned to look down the road.
Half drawn through a cloud of swirling ash, something large and boxy was rumbling toward us. Then came the growl of a big engine downshifting, and out of the black appeared a truck. It was a modern machine of military issue, all rivets and reinforcements and tires half a man high. The back was a windowless cube, and two flak-jacketed, machine-gun-armed wights stood guard along its running boards.
The moment it appeared, the squatters went into a kind of frenzy, laughing and gasping for joy, waving their arms and clasping their hands like marooned shipwreck survivors flagging down a passing plane—and just like that, we were forgotten. A golden opportunity had smacked into us, and we weren’t about to waste it. I tossed aside the head, scooped Addison into the crook of my left arm, and scrambled out of the road after Emma. We could’ve kept going—cut away from Smoking Street and retreated to some safer quarter of Devil’s Acre—but here, finally, was our enemy in the flesh, and whatever was happening or about to happen was clearly of importance. We stopped not far off the roadside, barely hidden behind a knot of charred trees, and watched.
The truck slowed and the crowd swarmed it, groveling and begging—for vials, for suulie and ambro and just a taste, just a little, please sir, disgusting in their worship of these butchers, pawing at the soldiers’ clothes and shoes and getting steel-toed kicks in return. I thought surely the wights would start shooting, or gun the engine and crush those foolish enough to stand between them and the bridge. Instead the truck stopped and the wights began to shout instructions. Form a line, right over here, keep orderly or you’ll get nothing! The crowd fell into formation like destitutes in a bread line, cowed and fidgeting in anticipation of what they were about to receive.
Without warning, Addison began to struggle to be set down. I asked him what was the matter, but he only whimpered and struggled harder, a desperate look on his face like he’d just caught a major scent trail. Emma pinched him and he snapped out of it long enough to say, “It’s her, it’s her—it’s Miss Wren,” and I realized that prizzo van was short for prison van, and that the cargo in the back of the wights’ enormous vehicle was almost certainly human.
Then Addison bit me. I yelped and let him go, and in an instant he was scrambling away. Emma swore and I said, “Addison, don’t!” But it was useless; he was operating on instinct, the irrepressible reflex of a loyal dog trying to protect his master. I dove for him and missed—he was surprisingly speedy for a creature with just three working legs—and then Emma hauled me up and together we were after him, out of our hiding place and into the road.
There was a moment, a fleeting instant, when I thought we could catch him, that the soldiers were too mobbed and the crowd too preoccupied to notice us. And it might’ve happened but for the shift that came over Emma halfway across the road, when she spied the doors at the back of the truck. Doors with locks that could be melted. Doors that could be flung open, she must’ve thought—I could read it in the hope dawning on her face—and she passed Addison without even reaching for him and clambered onto the truck’s bumper.
Shouts from the guards. I grabbed for Addison but he slid away, under the truck. Emma was starting to melt the handle of one door when the first guard swung his gun like a baseball bat. It hit her in the side and she tumbled to the ground. I ran at the guard, ready to do to him whatever I could with my one good arm, but my legs were kicked out from under me and I crashed down onto my hurt shoulder, a thunderbolt of pain surging through me.
Hearing the guard scream I looked up, saw him unarmed and waving an injured hand, and then he was tripping away into the mad swim of churning bodies. The squatters swarmed him, not just begging but demanding, threatening, crazed—and now, somewhere, one of them had his weapon. Looking panicked, he waved to the other wight with a two-hands-over-the-head get me out of here!
I struggled to my feet and ran for Emma. The other guard dove into the crowd, firing into the air until he could pull out his comrade and get back to the truck. The moment their feet hit the running boards, they slapped the side of the truck and the engine roared. I reached Emma just as it took off for the bridge, its monster tires spitting gravel and ash.
I clasped her arm to reassure myself she was still whole. “You’re bleeding,” I said, “a lot,” which was a clunky statement of fact but also the best I could articulate how awful it felt to see her hurt—limping, a gash on her scalp leaking blood into her hair.
“Where’s Addison?” she said. But before “I don’t know” had left my lips, she interrupted—“We’ve got to go after it. This may be our only chance!”
We looked up as the truck was reaching the bridge and saw the guard gun down two squatters chasing after it. As they fell writhing to the dirt, I knew she was wrong: there was no chasing down the truck, no getting across the bridge. It was hopeless—and now the squatters knew it. As their comrades fell, I could feel their desperation turn to rage, and in what seemed an instant that rage turned on us.
We tried to run but found ourselves blocked on all sides. The mob was shouting that we’d “ruined it,” that “they’d cut us off now,” that we deserved to die. Blows started raining down on us—slaps, punches, hands tearing at our hair and clothes. I tried to protect Emma but she ended up protecting me, for a few moments at least, swinging her hands around, burning whomever she could. Even her fire wasn’t enough to get them away from us, and the hits kept coming until we were on our knees, then balled up on the ground, arms protecting our faces, pain coming from every direction.
I was almost sure I was dying, or dreaming, because I heard at that moment singing—a loud, peppy chorus of “Hark to the driving of hammers, hark to the driving of nails!”—but with each line came a smattering of fleshy thuds and corresponding yelps: “What (SMACK!) to build a gallows, the (THWACK!) for all that ails!”
After a few lines and a few thwacks, the blows stopped raining down and the mob backed away, wary and grumbling. I saw dimly, through a haze of blood and grit, five brawny gallows riggers, tool belts hung from their waists and hammers raised in their hands. They’d cut a wedge through the crowd, and now they circled us, looking down doubtfully as if we were some strange species of fish they hadn’t been expecting to find in their nets.
“Is this them?” I heard one of them say. “They don’t look so good, cousin.”
“Of course it’s them!” said another, his voice like a foghorn, deep and familiar.
“It’s Sharon!” Emma cried.
I could move my hand just enough to wipe one eye clear of blood. There he stood, all seven black-cloaked feet of him. I felt myself laugh, or try to; I’d never been so glad to see someone so ugly. He was digging something out of his pocket—little glass vials—and raised them above his head shouting, “I’VE GOT WHAT YOU WANT RIGHT HERE, YOU SICK MONKEYS! GO TAKE THEM AND LEAVE THESE CHILDREN BE!”
He turned and threw the vials down the road. The mob flooded
after them, gasping and shouting, ready to tear one another apart to get them. And then it was just the riggers, slightly rumpled from the melee but unscathed, tucking their hammers back into their belts. Sharon, striding toward us with one snow-white hand outstretched, was saying, “What were you thinking, wandering off like that? I was worried sick!”
“It’s true,” said one of the riggers. “He was beside himself. Had us looking everywhere for you.”
I tried sitting up but couldn’t. Sharon was right over top of us, peering down like he was examining roadkill.
“Are you whole? Can you walk? What in the devil’s name have these reprobates done to you?” His tone was somewhere between angry drill sergeant and concerned father.
“Jacob’s hurt,” I heard Emma say, her voice cracking. “So are you,” I tried to say but couldn’t get my tongue straight. It seemed she was right: my head felt heavy as stone, and my vision was a failing satellite signal, good one moment, gone the next. I was being lifted, carried in Sharon’s arms—he was much stronger than he looked—and I had a sudden flashing thought, which I tried to say aloud:
Where’s Addison?
I was all mush-mouthed but somehow he understood me, and turning my head toward the bridge, he said, “There.”
In the distance, the truck seemed to be floating in midair. Was my concussed brain playing tricks?
No. I could see it now: the truck was being lifted across the gap by the hollow’s tongues.
But where’s Addison?
“There,” Sharon repeated. “Underneath.”
Two hind legs and a small brown body dangled from the truck’s underside. Addison had clamped onto some part of its undercarriage with his teeth and caught a ride, the clever devil. And as the tongues deposited the truck on the far side of the bridge, I thought, Godspeed, intrepid little dog. You may be the best hope we’ve got.
And then I was fading, fading, the world irising toward night.
Turbulent dreams, dreams in strange languages, dreams of home, of death. Odd bits of nonsense that spooled out in flickers of consciousness, swimmy and unreliable, inventions of my concussed brain. A faceless woman blowing dust into my eyes. A sensation of being immersed in warm water. Emma’s voice assuring me everything would be okay, they’re friends, we’re safe. Then deep and dreamless dark for unknown hours.