The Conference of the Birds

Chapter One


Deep in the green-­glowing bowels of a Chinatown seafood market, down a dead-­end hallway lined with crab tanks, we crouched in a puddle of dark the light-­eater had made, watched over by a thousand alien eyes. Leo s men were close, and they were angry. We heard shouts and crashes as they tore apart the market, looking for us. Please, I heard an old woman crying,  I didn t see anybody . . .


We had realized too late that the hallway had no exit, and now we were trapped here, squatting by a drain in a narrow gap between stacks of doomed crustaceans, their tanks piled ten high in leaning towers that scraped the ceiling. Between the bangs and shouts, beneath our sharp, panicked breathing, was the unceasing rhythm of crab claws tapping glass, an orchestra of broken typewriters burrowing into my skull.

At least it would mask the sound of our breathing. Maybe that would be enough, if Noor s unnatural dark held and if the men whose heavy steps were growing louder didn t look too closely at the wriggling void with unsteady edges; an omission in the air, a wrongness unmissable if your eyes came to rest on it. Noor had shaped it by dragging her hand through the air around us, dark spreading in its wake as light collected on her fingertips like luminous cake frosting. She popped it into her mouth, and it glowed through her cheeks and her throat as she swallowed, and disappeared.

It was Noor they wanted, but they would ve happily taken me, too, if only to shoot me. By now they had surely found H dead in his apartment, his eyes torn from their sockets by his own hollowgast. Earlier in the day, H and his hollow had broken Noor out of Leo s loop. They hurt some of Leo s guys. That, perhaps, would be forgivable. What was not: Leo Burnham, peculiar leader of the Five Boroughs clan, had been humiliated. A feral peculiar he laid claim to had been taken from him in his own house, the power center at the heart of a

Ransom Riggs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children novels. Riggs was born on a farm in Maryland and grew up in southern Florida. He studied literature at Kenyon College and film at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, bestselling author Tahereh Mafi, and their family.

The pulse-pounding fifth volume of the Miss Peregrine s Peculiar Children series continues storylines introduced in Map of Days . Lost friends are found, boundaries tested, and more surprising history is revealed.
               After this installment s dramatic ending, readers can only hope the next one isn t long in coming. Booklist
 
Praise for the #1 bestselling Miss Peregrine s Peculiar Children series:
 
A New York Times Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal Bestseller
 
Boy, can Ransom Riggs tell a story. If he d been stuck in rainy 1818 Switzerland with Lord Byron, and Mary and Percy Shelley and taken up Byron s challenge to write a ghost story, Miss Peregrine would have given Frankenstein a run for its money. NPR.org
 
A visually rich literary experience. New York Times Book Review
 
[A] chilling, wondrous novel. People
 
[A] thrilling, Tim Burton esque tale with haunting photographs. USA Today
 
Readers searching for the next Harry Potter may want to visit Miss Peregrine s Home for Peculiar Children. CNN
 
X-Men: First Class-meets-time-travel story line, David Lynchian imagery, and rich eerie detail. Entertainment Weekly
 
A tense, moving, and wondrously strange first novel. The photographs and text work together brilliantly to create an unforgettable story. John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Turtles All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars