Wendy takes a shuddering breath. Her clever, curious daughter. Will she be smarter than Wendy, less susceptible to Peter’s charms? Wendy can only hope.
She draws closer to the wreck of the ship. Beached and snapped in two, the prow pointing up toward the sky. But the interior might be intact, and there might be weapons or something else she could use. If anything in Neverland ever gave Peter pause, it was Hook. She can very well imagine the boys looking on the ship, even destroyed, with superstition, refusing to step inside what was once the realm of their greatest enemy.
Once. She comes close enough to touch the hull and rests her fingers against the weathered boards. What could be powerful enough to tear a ship in half this way? Were the pirates on board when it happened, and if not, where did they go?
NEVERLAND – 27 YEARS AGO
“Why must I stay behind? It isn’t fair.”
“Because you’re a girl. Girls don’t go to war.” Peter’s fists rest on his hips, elbows jutting out like strange wings. His tone is imperious, as though everything he’s saying should be perfectly obvious and Wendy is dull for not understanding.
“You have to heal the soldiers when they’re wounded so they can rejoin the war. Those are the rules.”
“What rules? Who made the rules?” Wendy is taller than Peter; when she pokes him in the chest he takes a step back, and there’s a moment of satisfaction as she looms over him. His scowl deepens, his bottom lip pushing out as he glares up at her, but Wendy ignores him. “If Michael and John get to go, I should get to go too.”
“No. You stay here.” Peter crosses his arms. He moves to the makeshift tent’s doorway, and somehow his slight frame fills the space so Wendy can’t see any way to slip past him.
“Fine.” She crosses her own arms, turning her head and refusing to look at him. She hopes his expression is hurt, but she won’t give him the satisfaction of looking to see for sure. She makes herself hold the pose, not turning around again until he’s gone.
The sense of triumph is temporary. Almost as soon as the tent flap falls shut behind him, Peter is shouting orders, her presence and their argument just as likely forgotten.
“Everyone, it’s time to choose our swords,” Peter says.
Wendy sticks her tongue out at the tent wall, even though there’s no one left to see her. Of course when Peter says everyone he doesn’t mean her. His words never say what they ought to, and yet the way he says them is so certain. It infuriates her.
It doesn’t matter that the swords are only long branches and sticks stripped of their leaves. To the boys they’re real enough and the fact that she doesn’t get one of her own still stings. Wendy keeps her eyes fixed on the tent wall, watching the sun cast the boys’ flickering shadows against its skin as they gather their weapons. All except Peter’s.
She thinks again of how he made such a fuss when she sewed the shadow he brought her back onto his body. And after all the squirming and pouting, after all the trouble she went to, it unraveled almost immediately. Wendy knows she isn’t the best seamstress—and according to her mother, she might just be the worst—but her stitching isn’t that bad. Shadows aren’t meant to come apart like that, or, now that she thinks about it, even be separated from the people they belong to in the first place.
Why should it surprise her though—when none of Peter’s other words mean what they should—that he might have lied to her about his shadow, too? It’s clear enough that he managed to lose his somehow, but she’s almost certain the one he brought to her to sew back on didn’t belong to him.
As the boys drift away from the tent, Michael and John among them, Wendy’s shoulders slump. She wonders if either of her brothers spoke up for her, or whether she was the only one to argue with Peter’s ridiculous rules. She looks around the tent, restless and irritated. Peter hasn’t even left her anything to do, other than clean up the boys’ things and she’s had quite enough of that already. Everything can just lie where it is and rot for all she cares.
With nothing else to occupy her, Wendy tries to count on her fingers the number of days they’ve been here, but she loses track immediately. Time is tricky in Neverland, just like everything else. Days and nights blur together, and there’s so much to see and do, it’s easy to become distracted.
Are their parents worried? At least they must know that she and Michael and John are together, and she’ll take care of them, like she always does.
Shouts echo through the trees, layered over the sound of wooden sticks clacking together. She’s tempted to peek her head out, maybe even find a tree where she can hide and watch the war. It sounds exciting at least, and she can imagine Peter leaping over the other boys’ heads, laughing and quick. She’s about to slip outside when a sheepish face pokes through the tent door. Roger, she remembers, is what the boy is called. There’s a gap between his two front teeth, and his brown hair refuses to lie flat, sticking up every which way like a bird’s nest. He holds his arm against his chest as he ducks inside.
“Peter says I’ve been kilt and I have to sit here ’til you fix me so I can go out and fight again.”
Wendy wants to be cross with him, but it isn’t Roger’s fault.
“Oh, all right.” She points. “Sit there.”
Roger hangs his head as he obeys, and she finds a bit of cloth that they were using to play blind man’s bluff last night.
“How were you killed?” Wendy asks, assessing Roger critically.
“Stab wound, right here.” He taps his finger against
