“Don’t talk like that,” said Horace. “You’ll jinx us.”
“Wren’s a miracle worker,” the clown said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Emma.
“Of course I am. So what’s your plan? You’ll stay and help us fight, obviously, but where will you sleep? Not with me, my room’s a single. Exceptions rarely made.” He looked at Emma and raised an eyebrow. “Note I said rarely.”
All of a sudden everyone was looking off at the paintings on the walls or adjusting their collars—except for Emma, whose face was turning a certain shade of green. Maybe we were naturally pessimistic, and our chances of success had seemed so tiny that we’d never bothered to wonder what we’d do if we actually fixed Miss Peregrine—or maybe the crises of the past few days had been so constant and pressing that we’d never had a chance to wonder. Either way, the clown’s question had caught us off guard.
What if we really pulled this off? What would we do if Miss Peregrine walked into the room, right now, restored to her old self?
It was Millard who finally gave an answer. “I suppose we would head west again, back where we come from. Miss Peregrine could make another loop for us. One where we’d never be found.”
“That’s it?” the clown said. “You’ll hide? What about all the other ymbrynes—the ones who weren’t so lucky? What about mine?”
“It isn’t our job to save the whole world,” Horace said.
“We’re not trying to save the whole world. Just all of peculiardom.”
“Well, that’s not our job, either.” Horace sounded weak and defensive, ashamed to have been cornered into saying this.
The clown leaned forward in his chair and glared at us. “Then whose job is it?”
“There’s got to be someone else,” said Enoch. “People who are better equipped, who’ve trained for this sort of thing …”
“The first thing the corrupted did three weeks ago was attack the Peculiar Home Guard. In less than a day, they were scattered to the four winds. With them gone, and now our ymbrynes, who does the defense of peculiardom fall to, eh? People like you and me, that’s who.” The clown threw down his turkey leg. “You cowards disgust me. I just lost my appetite.”
“They are tired, had long journey,” said the folding man. “Give them break.”
The clown waved his finger in the air like a schoolmarm. “Uh-uh. Nobody rides for free. I don’t care if you’re here for an hour or a month, as long as you’re here, you’ve got to be willing to fight. Now, you’re a scrawny-looking bunch, but you’re peculiar, so I know you’ve all got hidden talents. Show me what you can do!”
He got up and moved toward Enoch, one arm extended like he was going to search Enoch’s pockets for his peculiar ability. “You there,” he said. “Do your thing!”
“I’ll need a dead person in order to demonstrate,” Enoch said.
“That could be you, if you so much as lay one finger on me.”
The clown rerouted himself toward Emma. “Then how about you, sweetheart,” he said, and Emma held a particular finger up and made a flame dance atop it like a birthday candle. The clown laughed and said, “Sense of humor! I like that,” and moved on to the blind brothers.
“They’re connected in the head,” said Melina, putting herself between the clown and the brothers. “They can see with their ears, and always know what the other’s thinking.”
The clown clapped his hands. “Finally, something useful! They’ll be our lookouts—put one in the carnival and keep the other here. If anything goes wrong out there, we’ll know right away!”
He pushed past Melina. The brothers shied away from him.
“You can’t separate them!” said Melina. “Joel-and-Peter don’t like being apart.”
“And I don’t like being hunted by invisible corpse beasts,” said the clown, and he began to pry the older brother from the younger. The boys locked arms and moaned loudly, their tongues clicking and eyes rolling wildly in their heads. I was about to intervene when the brothers came apart and let out a doubled scream so loud and piercing I feared my head would break. The dishes on the table shattered, everyone ducked and clapped their hands over their ears, and I thought I could hear, from the frozen floors below, cracks spidering through the ice.
As the echo faded, Joel-and-Peter clutched each other on the floor, shaking.
“See what you did!” Melina shouted at the clown.
“Good God, that’s impressive!” the clown said.
With one hand Bronwyn picked the clown up by his neck.
“If you continue to harass us,” she said calmly, “I’ll put your head through the wall.”
“Sorry … about … that,” the clown wheezed through his closing windpipe. “Put … me … down?”
“Go on, Wyn,” said Olive. “He said he’s sorry.”
Reluctantly, Bronwyn set him down. The clown coughed and straightened his costume. “Looks like I misjudged you,” he said.
“You’ll make fine additions to our army.”
“I told you, we’re not joining your stupid army,” I said.
“What’s the point of fighting, anyway?” Emma said. “You don’t even know where the ymbrynes are.”
The folding man unfolded from his chair to tower above us.
“Point is,” he said, “if corrupted get rest of ymbrynes, they become unstoppable.”
“It seems like they’re pretty unstoppable already,” I said.
“If you think that’s unstoppable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said the clown. “And if you think that while your ymbryne is free they’ll ever stop hunting you, you’re stupider than you look.”
Horace stood up and cleared his throat. “You’ve just laid out the worst-case scenario,” he said. “Of late, I’ve heard a great many worst-case scenarios presented. But I haven’t heard a single argument laid for the best-case scenario.”
“Oh, this should be rich,” said the clown. “Go ahead, fancy boy, let’s hear it.”
Horace took a deep breath, working up his courage. “The wights wanted the ymbrynes, and now they have them—or most of them, anyway. Say, for the sake of argument, that’s all the wights need, and now they can follow through with their devilish plans. And they do: they become superwights, or demigods, or whatever it is they’re after. And then they have no more use for ymbrynes, and no more use for peculiar children, and no more use for time loops, so they go away to be demigods elsewhere and leave us alone. And then things not only go back to normal, they’re better than they were before, because no longer is anyone attempting to eat us or kidnap our ymbrynes. And then maybe, once in a great while, we could take a vacation abroad, like we used to, and see the world a bit, and put our toes in the sand somewhere that isn’t cold and gray three hundred days of the year. In which case, what’s the use in staying here and fighting? We’d be throwing ourselves onto their swords when everything might turn out just rosy without our intervention.”