Thin Ice (MPHfPC Fanfic)

Chapter Sixteen:

A bird screeched and a woman's voice was calling "Keep hold on your thoughts. Remind yourself- what are you trying to do?" A flurry of feathers and exhilaration.

Then the sounds and sensations disappeared.

A desk materialized in front of me, covered with papers and books. I caught a glimpse of latin on the page of an open book.

"Dinner!"

That too, disappeared.

A scene appeared before me again, this time I was watching from the third person, a raven-haired girl and two boys sitting at a table.

They were splitting an orange. The older boy seemed to be savoring the flavor, but the other two children ate theirs quickly.

"Heavenly." The older boy said with a sigh, his eyes seemingly dancing with enjoyment.

The younger boy was licking his fingers. "When we make our way into the world, we can have all the oranges we want."

"I don't want to leave." The older boy said. "I don't want to leave mother and father. And I want to have an honest life."

"Then how'd we get this orange, if you didn't do a dis-honest deed to get it?" The other boy reasoned. "You can't get anything in life if you don't cheat to get it."

"Why do we have to go?" The little girl wined. "I know mummy and daddy are mad at us, but I don't want to go! I don't want to steal, either."

The younger boy frowned and didn't say anything. But the older sighed.

"You're too young to understand. But Jack's right about one thing. We'll have to leave, we're hurting everyone if we stay."

"We'll never fit in anyway." The younger boy grinned a bit too wide, as if excited to be driven out of his home. As if excited to have to steal.

. . .

I woke up on the floor, confused.

True, the memories had been shorter, some only glimpses and sounds, but I was nowhere near Miss Peregrine.

So why was I getting more of her memories?

And this time, I was feeling a bit disoriented, as if part of me was still immersed in the dreams. The memories were fitting into a timeline, arranging themselves.

I sat up, dizzy, fingers tingling. This time, though, when I pushed my hand through the air, it wasn't orange threads that came out of my fingertips. They were blue, swirling with dark and light strands. It tried to weave a book, but they wouldn't cooperate. Instead, they shaped themselves into a bowl, simmering with the silvery threads. A scene started to materialize on the surface, a vague outline of two people. But then the bowl collapsed and disappeared.

"Hey!" The guard yelled at me, noticing the blue. He banged his gun against the bars of my cell. "What're you doing in there?"

"Nothing that would help me escape," I grumbled. "Don't worry."

"Well," The guard ordered. "Don't do it again."

The next night, I did it again.

The glimpses I had this time weren't from Miss Peregrine, though. They were from Jake.

. . .

I pulled the string from the roll of yarn. An elderly man tenderly took my hand in his while we wrapped the threads around the pushpins in the map, creating a path.

"See that?" The old man asked me. "You're going to take this path someday. Think of what you'll find!"

"Do you think I'll ever meet your old friends?" I ask. "The ones in the pictures?"

"Maybe," He answered. "But you'll have to be brave, Tygrysku. The path is not pleasant."

"I'm brave!"

"I know you are."

"Will you tell me about them again?"

"But you already have the story memorized. I don't know if I should." He smiled.

"No! Please grandpa? I like it when you tell it."

"No, Tygrysku. Your parents will be home any minute now."

. . .

The dreams were becoming more vivid now, the sound more clarified.

And now, everytime my hands become tingly, blue comes out instead of orange. And everytime, they formed a bowl, but before the scenes could fully form, they dissolved just as quickly.

I was better at hiding my use of it now, with my back facing the entrance and my body curled protectively around the tendrils of blue.

The only bad thing was, I couldn't fix my book. Since I was only able to create blue now, I wasn't able to fix it. And ever since the wight had torn it in half, the pages had turned blank to my eyes, all except for the charred bit at the end. Its green cover had seemed to fade, and the rest of the pages seemed to have yellowed. It was like it was aging forward.

I tried multiple times a day, as I had a lot of time on my hands, to create the orange threads. But when I called on the feeling, all that appeared was blue. The orange strands seemed to be just out of reach, able to be pulled from my gut, but I couldn't seem to figure out how.

Later that day, when the guard on duty fell asleep, we were able to converse between ourselves, through our bars. None of us knew where the rest of our group was. Emma tried to melt the bars, but they were too thick. Jake hadn't felt any hollows, and Horace hadn't had any new dreams.

I caught them up on my new development, but no one had any ideas. No one had any theories as to how my peculiarity worked, or how to get the blue to stop and the orange to appear, or why I had gotten visions from two people now.

We were absolutely, thoroughly, hopeless.