“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.