Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs Page A

confronted with such pure misery. Could peculiars really be living these discarded lives? As Sharon pulled in an armful of shirts through the window, I asked him. He seemed almost offended by the idea. “Peculiars would never allow themselves to be so reduced. These are common slum dwellers, trapped in an endless repetition of the day this loop was made. Normals occupy the Acre’s festering edges—but its heart belongs to us.”
    They were normals. Not only that, but loop-trapped normals, like the ones on Cairnholm whom the crueler kids would torment during games of Raid the Village. As much a part of the background scenery as the sea or the cliffs, I told myself. But somehow, looking at the women’s weathered faces buried in rags, I felt no less terrible about stealing from them.
    â€œI’m sure we’ll know the peculiars when we see them,” Emma said, sorting through a pile of dirty blouses.
    â€œOne always does,” said Addison. “Subtlety has never been our kind’s strength.”
    I slipped out of my bloody shirt and traded it for the least filthy alternative I could find, the kind of garment you’d be issued at a prison camp: collarless and striped, its sleeves of unequal length, patched together from cloth rougher than sandpaper. But it fit me, and with the addition of a simple black coat I found tossed over a chair back, I now looked like someone who might plausibly be from this place.
    We turned our backs while Emma changed into a sacklike dress that pooled around her feet. “It’ll be impossible to run in this,” she grumbled. Plucking a pair of scissors from the seamstresses’ table, she began to alter it with all the care of a butcher, ripping and jabbing until she’d sliced off the bottom at the knee.
    â€œThere.” She admired her rough handiwork in a mirror. “A bit raggedy, but …”
    Without thinking I said, “Horace can make you one better.” Somehow I’d forgotten that our friends weren’t just waiting for us in the next room. “I mean … if we see them again …”
    â€œDon’t,” Emma said. For an instant she looked so sad, absolutely lost in it—and then she turned away, put down the scissors, and moved purposefully toward the door. When she turned to face us again, her expression had gone hard. “Come on. We’ve wasted enough time here as it is.”
    She had this amazing capacity to turn sadness into anger and anger into action, which meant nothing ever kept her down for long. And then Addison and I—and Sharon, who I suspect hadn’t quite known whom he was dealing with until now—were following her out the door and down the stairs.
    * * *
    The whole of Devil’s Acre—the peculiar heart of it, anyway—was only ten or twenty blocks square. After coming down from the workhouse we pried loose a board from a fence and squeezed into a suffocating passageway. It led to another that was slightly less suffocating, and that led to one a bit wider still, and that to one wide enough that Emma and I could walk side by side. On they widened, like arteries relaxing after a heart attack, until we came to something that might properly have been called a street, with red bricks running down the middle and sidewalks paving the edges.
    â€œFall back,” Emma muttered. We shrank behind a corner andpeeked out like commandos, our heads stacked.
    â€œWhat do you think you’re doing?” Sharon said. He was still in the street and seemed more worried about being embarrassed by us than being killed.
    â€œLooking for ambush points and escape routes,” Emma said.
    â€œNo one’s ambushing anyone,” Sharon replied. “The pirates only operate in no man’s land. They won’t come after us here—this is Louche Lane.”
    There was, in fact, a street sign to that effect—the first I’d seen in all of Devil’s