“Come on,” Peter told her, picking up the bucket that held the tree's precious cutting. “We need to get the seed fruit out of here.”
As they fled, the swamp began to dry. The tree continued to shrink and sink into the mud. By the end, little more than a hunk of petrified wood remained, buried under earth, as hard and dry as stone. Gwen shoved her chunk of bark into her satchel.
The tree did not die in isolation. Everything around it began to wither and fade. As Peter and Gwen passed through the vines back into the jungle's heart, the foliage felt like paper and had turned an uninspired brown. As they pushed aside the shriveled vines, some even dropped from the trees and decayed on the ground.
Peter and Gwen ran much faster than the Never Tree's decay spread, but the colorful flowers and verdant underbrush of the woods had already begun to droop and sag. Their lethargy hinted at the lifelessness destined for them. Neverland was dying.
“Whatever happens now, Gwenny, head to the weastern shore,” Peter told her. “The fairies are corralling everyone else out there, waiting for the Aviator's instructions. We shouldn't have anyone left in the jungle.”
Gwen hoped Antoine would be able to help, but she didn't know what he could airdrop that would save them now. She worried for Rosemary, and could not wait until she made it to the beach herself to know if her little sister was alright. “I'm going to check in with Rosemary,” she told Peter.
“If she's not on the weastern shore, tell her to hurry there!”
Plucking the can out of her purse, she didn't bother to pick up the contract with reality when it flopped out. Leaving it behind, she continued to run as she shouted into her can, “Rosemary, are you there? Where are you?”
The young girl answered as if she'd been waiting for the call. “I'm running the big loop around the Never Tree with Hollyhock, making sure nobody's left out here. That would be sad. Everything is getting kind of dead.”
“You need to head out to the weastern shore now, Rose,” Gwen told her. “It'll be really sad if you're left out by the Never Tree, okay?”
Peter interrupted, “Wait, where is she?”
Gwen, who didn't even understand how Neverland's binary cardinal directions worked, opted to hand the can to Peter. He asked Rosemary himself, quickly discussing her position and pinpointing where they were in relation to each other. It amazed Gwen that her sister could understand Neverland as innately as Peter Pan himself, but her younger sister appeared to have more magic in her than she had ever suspected.
“Okay, stay put then. We'll see you in a few minutes,” Peter told her. With only the slightest change of course, Peter explained, they would be able to intercept Rosemary and Hollyhock.
As they ran through the forest, they picked up enough speed and confidence to begin flying. In proximity of the dying Never Tree, Gwen couldn't lift off, and even Peter's flight faltered. Further away, where the horrible fate of the island had not yet rippled out, residual magic kept the air alive and ripe for flight. They soared and did not stop for anything. The fairy dust and confidence they flew with meant that flight, not governed by the Never Tree, would be the last magic to vanish on the island.
They passed the last of the black coats in jungle snare traps, the ones overlooked by the pirates, still clamoring for their compatriots to come save them. Peter and Gwen helped each other ignore the tempting, tantalizing lights of the will-o-the-wisp in the distance. They both passed by the bleeding corpse of the grizzly bear that had, some short ages ago, carried Gwen to Tiger Lily.
She still needed to bear that horrible news to Peter, but she knew it could wait. Tiger Lily's death was a grown-up thing, and now was no time for grown-up things.
The redskins had lost so many braves: their medicine woman, their chief's daughter, and perhaps their chief, too. Gwen did not know if the redskin tribe of Neverland would survive such heavy losses, or if they would even want to when their native soil had been ravaged by the loss of the Never Tree.
Worlds were made and unmade all the time. She tried not to let it trouble her, but it did.
Soon they ran into Rosemary. The young girl stood with the patient posture of a ballerina, waiting for Peter and her sister while Hollyhock frittered in the air around her.
“Rose!” Gwen exclaimed. They ran to each other, and Gwen dropped down to hug her sister. Rosemary began babbling into Gwen's ear, telling her everything she could think to say about the day's adventure.
“We caught so many black coats!” she remarked, her excitement radiating through her missing-tooth smile. “And I met pirates when they came to get them. One of them had a wooden leg. I asked if I could touch it, but he yelled and told me he'd skin me alive if I tried, which I don't think was very nice. I don't think he knew about manners. I saw the lights in the jungle! I didn't go near them though. Although I think Sal did, because I can't find him anywhere and there aren't that many hiding places in Neverland that I don't know about. Inch and Wax are missing too.”
“Have you been to the lagoon yet, or checked the underground home?” Peter asked as Hollyhock buzzed over him, dumping yet another coat of fairy dust on him for good luck.
“Nope,” Rosemary answered. “The grown-ups figured out where some of the tunnels were by the sand castle and then blasted them open and broke them. I don't think they got into the underground home, though. They took a bunch of kids out of the tunnels, too, which I think is cheating.”
“I agree. We
