Hollow City: Chapters 8–10

I was supposed to know whether, somewhere in that great, seething mass, there were monsters who meant to kill us—and I was supposed to know it simply by looking; by assessing some vague feeling in my gut.

It gave me an out-of-body sort of feeling, to cast my sense out into a crowd this way, prodding distant corners for traces of danger.

“Quite ingenious how it works, given all the time differences,” he said.

“It’s crucial we stay together,” she said.

We waded into the crowd, hands linked, our snaking line slightly parabolic in the middle where Olive buoyed up like an astronaut walking on the moon.

My phone was a useless relic of the future but an object which retained some power nevertheless—that of a long, thin filament connecting this baffling world to the sane and recognizable one I’d once belonged to; a thing that said to me as I touched it, You are here and this is real and you are not dreaming and you are still you, and somehow that made everything around me vibrate a little less quickly.

Millard was hyperventilating, hysterical—and it scared me.

Then we came upon a scene of destruction so bizarre that I had to stop and gape at it—not out of some morbid voyeurism, but because it was impossible for my brain to process without further study.

I tried to keep my eyes to the ground, but there was no shutting out all the ghastly things we passed.

We were barely here, ineffectual as ghosts.

At first it was mayhem: we bounded in, grabbing wildly as the pigeons took off.

I thought Olive, who was small and quick, or Hugh, with his peculiar connection to another sort of winged creature, might have some luck, but both were humiliated.

“Need I remind you,” said Millard, “these are not the sort of bombs we’re accustomed to. Unlike the ones that fall on Cairnholm, we don’t know where they’re going to land!”

We stopped, straining to hear the telltale coo of pigeons.

I have entered the realm of the insane.

It was cold and damp and almost completely dark, the electricity having been knocked out, so Emma sparked a flame in her hand and shone it around, until the nature of the space became apparent.

“That is what I am attempting to puzzle out.”

And then, through some Herculean effort of will, I made myself climb.

Millard insisted on carrying the Tales in his arms, heavy and bulky as it was, because he might need to refer to it at any moment, he said.

This time, I got a new kind of twinge in my gut, ever so faint, as if a hollow had been here and gone, and I was sensing its residue.

I also noticed that whenever one was speaking and the other wasn’t, the quiet one would mouth the other’s words in perfect synchronicity—as if they shared one mind.

I imagined peculiars who’d withstood the initial attack on this house gathering here for a last stand.

“Mine is passive,” I said. “I can’t turn it off, so it doesn’t leave much of a trail.

You were thirteen when you realized you could manipulate objects using only your mind.

In my panicked state, this came out as “GO NOW RUN HOLLOWS NOW,” which was effective if not terribly articulate, and threw everyone into hysterics.

We bolted through the catacombs, Emma’s fire casting manic shadows across the walls, the blind boys clicking loudly with their tongues and shouting out “Left!” or “Right!” when we came to splits in the tunnel.

Alarms blared inside me, my stomach aching like I’d drunk acid.

Then awe gave way to fear and the urgency of self-preservation, and we rushed down the debris-strewn steps into the street—past the ruined square, around a double-decker bus that looked like it had been crushed in the fist of an angry giant—running I knew not where, nor cared, so long as it was away from the Feeling that grew stronger and sicker inside me with each passing moment.

Maybe we could hide in the debris and the chaos around us, and with so much noise and distraction everywhere, the hollows would pass us by.

I envied the blind brothers, navigating a mercifully detail-free topography; the world in wireframe.

“Because I trust your random guesses more than my own.”

Bronwyn wrenched off the knob and tossed it into the street, and the door creaked open on its own.

Emma found some rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet and insisted on cleaning and bandaging the cut on my head.

The clay man jumped up and clicked his heels, then took an exaggerated bow.

Then a black hail of debris whipped hard against my back and I hugged my knees to my chest, making myself as compact as I could.

My legs were intact but shaking; they wouldn’t take my weight.

Embedded in each were long shards of glass and pieces of metal that should have passed right through our bodies—but hadn’t.

“I’m sorry if I’ve offended your delicate sensibilities,” Enoch said, his voice rising in exasperation, “but you’ve never had an ymbryne and you’ve never lived in a loop, and so you couldn’t possibly understand that this—right now—is not real, strictly speaking. It’s the past.

The life of every normal in this city has already been lived. Their fates are predetermined, no matter how many ambulances we steal!

“If even outcasts and downtrodden folk like yourselves can’t muster a bit of compassion for others,” she said, “then there’s no hope for this world.”