The peculiars would be slaughtered! She turned around at once and flew back to warn them. She found Tombs in his tent and told them what she’d seen.

He didn’t seem surprised in the least.

He had known.

“Why didn’t you tell them so many soldiers were coming?” Ymeene said. “You lied!”

“They would have been terrified,” he said. “They would not have comported themselves with dignity.”

“They should be terrified!” she shouted. “They should have fled by now!”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” he said. “The normals’ king has ordered Britain cleansed of peculiars from mountains to sea. They would find us eventually.”

“Not if we leave Britain,” Ymeene said.

“Leave Britain!” he said, shocked. “But we’ve been here hundreds of years!”

“And we’ll be dead a lot longer than that,” Ymeene replied.

“It’s a matter of honor,” Tombs said. “I suppose a bird wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand all too well,” she replied, and went out to warn the others.

But it was too late: the normals’ army was on their doorstep, a swarm of well-armed soldiers already visible in the distance. Worse yet, the peculiars couldn’t even run—the normals were closing in from all sides.

The peculiars huddled in their camp, terrified. Death seemed inevitable. Ymeene could easily have changed form and flown to safety—the peculiars urged her to, in fact—but she could not bring herself to leave. They had been tricked, lied to, and the sacrifice they were about to make was no longer voluntary. To leave now would not have felt like an exercise of her principles, but like abandonment and treachery. So she walked through the camp, embracing her friends. Englebert hugged her the hardest, and even after he’d let go, he spent a long moment gazing at her.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“Memorizing the face of my friend,” he said. “So that I might recall it even in death.”

Silence fell over them and over the camp, and for a while the only sounds were the thunder and clang of the approaching army. And then the sun came out suddenly from behind a dark cloud, bathing the land in glinting light, and Ymeene thought the sight so beautiful that she wished she could see it once more before they were killed. So she repeated it, and the peculiars were so mesmerized that she repeated it a second time. Only then did they notice that, in the minutes they had spent watching the sun, the normals’ army had not come any closer. With every repetition, their enemies faded and reappeared farther away, many hundreds of yards in the distance.

It was then that Ymeene realized her time-looping talent had a use she’d never fully understood—one that would change peculiar society forever, though she couldn’t have known it then. She’d made a safe place for them, a bubble of stalled time, and the peculiars watched in fascination as the normals’ army advanced toward them and then faded away, over and over again, in a three-minute loop.