*Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters or settings in this one-shot, unless I say otherwise. They all belong to Ransom Riggs.*

This one-shot takes place after H's death, but before finding V.

We were all gathered in front of a specific patch of wooden floorboard in Abe's house. By 'all' I mean Noor, Emma, Enoch, Millard, and me. H had, in his last, dying breath, instructed us to look for a Hollow Hunter only known as 'V'.

'There must be something useful down there.' Emma said, a hopeful edge to her voice. We were all trying to find a lead to V's current location, or in the least, a living Hollow Hunter that'd lead us to her. I knew the chances were slim, given that H had referred to V as 'the last of us', but Noor and I didn't want to disappoint the others. There must be even a minuscule chance that at least one of them, other than V, remained.

I knelt, feeling the hard, wood planks that covered the floor to try to find the loose floorboard that would lead us to Abe's secret bunker. Once I found it, I wedged my fingers through the crack, trying to pull it away. It didn't work, though. I needed a little more momentum.

I looked up at my friends, who were waiting in anticipation.

'Do any of you have something that'll help me pry this apart?' I asked, remembering to keep an eye on the floorboard, so that I wouldn't lose track of it.

My friends scurried to look for something, and Noor came up with a letter opener. I nodded my thanks before wedging its edge into the crack, and pushing down on it hard. With some difficulty, the floorboard came away.

I shifted it into a corner, then beckoned my friends forth.

'We'll need a source of light; it's dark down there.' Millard observed, looking at Emma.

She offered to go first, lighting her hand with spectacularly orange flames. I moved aside to let her in, and, one by one, we descended into the damp darkness.

I found the numbered-and-lettered keypad right where it was last time. We'd been through so much since then that I'd come to doubt the fact that we'd been here just a mere few weeks ago. I quickly punched in the password; 'Tygrysku', which meant 'little tiger' in Polish. It was what Abe had called me when I was younger, and when he was still alive.

The door clicked open to reveal a ladder once more descending into darkness. I let Emma go first, so that she could light the way, then climbed in afterward. The rungs echoed with a barely audible metallic ringing as I dropped down.

After we'd reached the tunnel, we all clambered through it, hunched to fit through, the subtle scent of mildew evident.

We 'walked' in silence, until I remembered that Noor hadn't been here before.

I filled her in on how we'd stumbled upon Abe's secret bunker when we'd been here a while ago as we crawled. She listened silently; her barely visible nods the only indication that she could understand.

Similar to the last time I'd been here, the tunnel ended at a heavy-looking door. It was hanging slightly ajar, again, just like we'd left it.

We took turns to walk in, closed the door- leaving it slightly ajar behind us- then flicked a switch to obliterate the dark interior of the bunker. Once the fluorescent lights flickered to life, we looked hither and thither, trying to find a lead to build upon.

As the others looked through piles of magazines and almost ancient machinery, I peered through the periscope, making sure that we weren't followed. A lot could go wrong when a group of peculiars ventured out into the present.

After I made certain that we weren't going to be caught off guard on by hollowgast or a horde of wights, I joined the others in the search for information. Millard had uncovered another stack of logbooks, which he was reading through. Emma and Enoch were looking through a selection of supplies stacked into a wooden shelf, and Noor had ventured over to the machine that sat on a table beside a wall.

'That's a pneumatic teleprinter.' I informed her, and she nodded in assent. We were all silent, the critical importance of our research drawing in our concentration.

I turned to examine the walls. We'd found two cars when we were last here, by going through a concealed door. Maybe Abe had concealed more secret passages in the walls of his bunker.

We were all immersed in our individual research, when Millard finally broke the silence.

'Abe's mentioned a few more 'operatives' here.' He said, holding up a thick logbook to show us all a page mentioning two operatives that we hadn't known about before: F and P. 'V was the one H wanted us to find.' He continued, setting the book down on a shelf. 'It would be much easier to do that if we could find out where F and P currently reside, if they haven't already perished.'

'Are there any more mentions of them?' Enoch interrogated, looking up at the corner he presumed Millard currently was. 'It'd be much easier to figure out where those chaps are if Abe had talked about them.'

Millard lifted the book back up from its current perch. I could almost see the frown on his face.

'I think he did mention them a few times- though P more than F. He talked about F back in page…' He paused to turn to a specific part of the book. 'Well, see for yourself.'

We all crowded around the logbook which Millard was holding up. It was opened to a page close to the middle, and was an account of a mission a year or so before the Hollow Hunters went their separate ways. Emma hung back, though, interested in something she'd found in a stack of books in the opposite corner.

The entry was quite long. So long, in fact, that Millard had given up on having us read it, and resorted to vocally summarizing it instead.

'Basically,' he said, turning the book back to face him, presumably reading through the entry once more. 'F had gotten gravely injured in a mission to save a girl who grew feathers in Los Angeles, and had to be taken to a nearby hospital immediately. His- or her- state of health wasn't mentioned thereafter, so I think we can all assume that F is no more.'

Enoch groaned.

'That's just one operative, though.' Millard hastened to add. 'We still have P- and if P's dead as well, we can always find V by scouring maps. Oh, and if that doesn't work-'

'That sounds like a perfectly good strategy to me!' Noor interrupted. 'Do we have any leads on P, though? I feel like Miss Peregrine might worry if we aren't at Devil's Acre at the latest.'

Yes, he's mentioned a lot more than F.' He replied, turning pages in the logbook once more. 'He's also a lot more… interesting.'

'Did he kill people?' Enoch quipped, suddenly interested.

'No!' Millard exclaimed. 'Well, he might've, but that's not what I was talking about.'

'What were you getting to, then?' I asked, curious.

'Well…' He began. 'It's a little complicated, but if the conclusion I've drawn is precise- and it most likely is- P, for lack of a better term, 'quit' the Hollow Hunters. Apparently, he was extremely, almost surprisingly, adept at pretending to be a wight.'

We were all listening, completely silent, as Millard went on.

'P used to do just that. He'd go to the wights' fortress a few times a week; scouting them, figuring out their plans, et cetera. After a while, he started to do his 'job' with a lot more enthusiasm. He started to spend more time there than with the Hollow Hunters, and, as time went on, I think the rest of them finally realized he wasn't one of them anymore.' Millard finished, looking up from the logbook. 'That's just about it. There isn't a lot of information in here, I had to do a lot of guesswork.'

Nobody spoke for a while. It was just us and the overwhelming silence. We'd all forgotten why we were here in the first place; the information was just too terrible.

'Are you trying to tell me,' Enoch ventured, finally breaking the quietude. 'That this chap, P, was actually a wight?'

'That's not what I-' Millard started to say, but Emma interrupted him.

'That's not what he meant at all.' She said, a trace of fear in her voice. 'I think you should see this.' She added, holding up a dusty, leather-covered book.

'What's that?' I asked, weaving through the machinery to get a closer look at the book, from where she was holding it up from the corner.

'A photo album.' She replied. 'If a Hollow Hunter was posing as a wight, his picture would most definitely be in here. If we look closely at the eyes of someone we'd previously assumed to be a wight, we might uncover who P is, or, well, was.'

The plan was so rational that I was surprised we hadn't come up with it already.

I stood beside Emma as she opened the book.

'We should try looking for a Hollow Hunter we already know, first.' Noor suggested, looking over at us. 'That way, we'll know how the photographs are arranged.'

I nodded. 'Get the lay of the land first.'

'Okay.' Emma agreed, flipping through the book. 'Oh, there's H!'

'He looks much younger here.' I said, trying not to think about the operative the way I last saw him: dead. He did look much younger here. The photograph was black-and-white. It was clearly taken a long time ago.

'King.' Emma murmured, reading from a caption underneath H's photograph.

'That was probably his last name.' Enoch chipped in. 'It's a clever trick to throw your pursuers off the scent, at least for a while.'

'We'll have to look for the last names of wights, then.' I said, uneasy, as if we were uncovering something we shouldn't be.

'Is it arranged alphabetically?' Millard inquired.

'No,' Emma sighed, shaking her head. 'It looks almost… random. All the photographs with people that have their last names beginning with the letter 'K' are at the beginning of the book.'

'It might be arranged to suit a specific code.' I said, remembering how Abe and I used to move the alphabet forward or backward to create ciphers.

Noor snapped her fingers. 'That must be it! All the letters of the alphabet must have been shifted forward by eleven spaces!'

Just then, I wanted to celebrate. We were so close to unveiling a member of the Hollow Hunters, that I could almost reach for the information and grab it from the air.

'I hate to be a Debbie Downer,' Millard interjected, 'but we only know the names of a few wights.'

'He's not wrong.' Enoch said. 'I know the names of a few, but not all of them. I reckon we'll recognize more of them if we look at their pictures. The Ymbrynes keep showing them to us.'

Our original goal was left forgotten, as we all waited in tense anticipation as Emma flipped through the book, checking if any of the 'wights' were actually peculiars.

'Some of this fakery is blatantly obvious.' She scoffed, still turning pages.

'It was quite a long time ago.' Millard said. 'They probably didn't have a lot of…' He trailed off, the room falling into silence once more.

I looked up, confused, wondering why silence had engulfed us. Then, I realized that everyone was looking at Emma.

Fear clawing at my insides, I turned to look at her, too.

Her face was pale, and she was taking slow, shallow breaths.

'This is worse than we thought,' she was muttering, 'much, much worse.'

She lifted the book, turning it so that I'd be able to see what she was looking at. It was a photograph of a young man, looking straight into the camera, his pupils as real as any of ours.

'Murnau,' the caption read.